Conference Focuses On Israel's Jewish Defamers
Hitler is to be credited for the invention of Zionism, and Judaism for the invention of Hitler.
This according to prominent literary critic and writer George Steiner – one of several people singled out for shame at the "Israel’s Jewish Defamers" conference in Manhattan on Sunday organized by Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
Another target was Jacqueline Rose, professor of English at Queens Mary, University of London, the author of The Question of Zion.
"According to one story," she writes, "it was the same Paris performance of Wagner, when…[Adolf Hitler and Theodore Herzl] were both present on the same evening, that inspired Herzl to write Der Judenstaat, and Hitler Mein Kampf."
In Rose’s own later admission, the incident was "chronologically impossible."
Rosenfeld cited the further example of Princeton University’s Richard Falk, who wrote last year concerning the Hamas-Fatah battles in the Gaza Strip, "It’s especially painful for me as an American Jew to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel as a Holocaust in the making."
Co-panelist and author Cynthia Ozick reminded the 300-strong crowd that Jews have caused their own people much anguish in the past as well. Ozick recalled notorious medieval apostates such as Nicholas Donin and Pablo Christiani, before proceeding to conduct a literary lashing of Israel’s Jewish defamers, reserving special treatment for Michael Lerner.
The soft-spoken but eloquent Ozick lambasted Lerner’s Tikkun magazine’s literary quality as "radically inferior to almost every other journal intended for grown-ups, especially when it is Rabbi Lerner who is doing the writing," she said. "As a journalist, as a polemicist, as a putative philosopher, Lerner is chaotic, disorganized, frequently ungrammatical, self-contradictory, puerile, and unbearably long-winded."
Kenneth Levin, a Harvard psychiatrist and historian and the panel’s third member, also pointed to historical precedents such as the German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who supported British restrictions on Jewish immigration on the eve of World War II. Two months after war broke out, Buber argued that Zionism was "performing the acts of Hitler in the land of Israel, for they [the Zionists] want to serve Hitler’s god [nationalism] after he has been given a Hebrew name."
Within Israeli academia today, he said, "attacking Israel’s legitimacy has become virtually a paradigm of interdisciplinary cooperation, attracting people from myriad disciplines."
"Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them," panel moderator Edward Alexander said, quoting George Orwell. Professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington, Alexander recently co-authored The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders.
During an earlier address Sunday, CAMERA national president Andrea Levin devoted special attention to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, which often employs such terms such as apartheid to describe Israeli policies.
CAMERA associate director and research director Alex Fabian addressed "elite bias" in both the New York and London Review of Books.
Harvard’s Levin, who wrote The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Seige, likened Israel’s Jewish defamers to chronically abused children, who, in an attempt to escape their existential predicament, blame themselves for the abuse, thereby establishing the hope that if they change their behavior, the abuse will stop.
Whatever their motivations, the Jewish defamers are "an increasingly problematic issue," Andrea Levin told The Jewish Press. "This has nothing to do with criticism…. It has to do with demonstrably false and baseless defaming of Israel, wildly distorted out of context accusations against Israel."
Last year an essay by Alvin Rosenfeld (released by the American Jewish Committee), " ‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," became the subject of a New York Times article, and created a stir in some circles.
Among those whom Rosenfeld quoted was Noam Chomsky, who in 2002 said, "Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem…. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98 percent control."
Rosenfeld also quoted Professor Michael Neumann of Trent University who said Palestinians "are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die."
According to Neumann, "if saying these things is anti-Semitic, then it can be reasonable to be anti-Semitic."
His reaction to the possibility that such anti-Semitism may lead to bloodshed? "Who cares?... To regard any shedding of Jewish blood as a world-shattering calamity ... is racism, pure and simple; the valuing of one race’s blood over all others."
That article and the negative reception by some provided part of the impetus to form Sunday’s conference, CAMERA’s Safian said in an interview.
Reporter Hannes Stein of the German newspaper Die Welt said he will receive "lots and lots of furious comments" should he publish his piece on Sunday’s conference on the Internet.
In Europeans’ minds, he said, "if you support Israel, then you must be either in the pay of the Mossad, or not right in your head, or be a bad person."
"We’re in a furious intellectual struggle," Rosenfeld told the crowd. "The stakes are very high…. We have to expose bad ideas as bad ideas … and confront [them] with good ideas."
"All the moral and intellectual arguments are on our side," Kenneth Levin said. "We just have to make them."
Not all the panelists were optimistic about the future. Asked what to do about Jewish defamers, Ozick said, "I think it’s hopeless."
Levin was only slightly more optimistic when asked about whether the battle for Israel’s future can be won: "I think we will succeed. The question is at what price…. The West is engaged in a parallel process." Hitler could have been stopped before killing millions of people had people taken voices such as Winston Churchill’s seriously, he said.
The conference closed with a workshop on "How to Write an Effective Letter and Get Published!"