Next week the Tribeca Film Festival will be premiering a film by Yoav Shamir called "Defamation" that is about anti-Semitism and the Anti-Defamation League. The latest Forward suggests that Shamir takes my line: that anti-Semitism is not an important factor in western Jews' lives.
In order to advance this conversation, I am today introducing the new Mondoweiss correspondent on anti-Semitism– a gifted young writer in his 30s named Franz Kafka. Over the next few weeks (or as long as my Kafka obsession lasts), I'm going to run excerpts from Kafka's diaries and letters that describe his apprehension of anti-Semitism in central Europe between the wars, 90 years or so ago. This apprehension fed Kafka's writings; and of course the conditions that he and his Jewish friends observed built, a decade after his death, to the Holocaust that killed among others his favorite sister Ottla and his lover Milena Jesenska-Polak.
What does real anti-Semitism feel like? Our first report by Kafka comes from a letter he wrote to the writer Max Brod in 1921. At the time the dying (and yes, privileged) Kafka was going from one sanatorium to another in central Europe to try and cure his lungs of tuberculosis. Kafka was incredibly sensitive to his company. A loud neighbor, and he would move on to the next sanatorium. This letter takes up a new guest at the sanatorium in Matliary, in what is now Slovakia, a woman who sent Kafka back to his room "trembling almost physically from the painful aftereffects of mere contact."
You mustn't conclude, Max, from everything I have written that I suffer from paranoia. I have learned by experience that no place remains unoccupied and if I do not sit high on my horse, the persecutor will be sitting there.
