These times demand the Times! The NYT Book Review devotes many many pages to anti-semitism today, including this penny dreadful by Harold Bloom reviewing Trials of the Diaspora, a History of Anti-Semitism in England, by Anthony Julius:
[Julius] is a truth-teller, and authentic enough to stand against the English literary and academic establishment, which essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Endless boycotts of Israel are urged by this establishment, and might yet have produced a counterboycott of British universities by many American academics, whether Jewish or not. However, under British law the projected boycotts may be illegal. The fierce relevance of Julius’s book is provoked by this currently prevalent anti-Semitism…
To protest the policies of the Israeli government actually can be regarded as true philo-Semitism, but to disallow the existence of the Jewish state is another matter. Of the nearly 200 recognized nation-states in the world today, something like at least half are more reprehensible than even the worst aspects of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. A curious blindness informs the shifting standards of current English anti-Zionism.
I admire Julius for the level tone with which he discusses this sanctimonious intelligentsia, who really will not rest until Israel is destroyed.
I end by wondering at the extraordinary moral strength of Anthony Julius. He concludes by observing: “Anti-Semitism is a sewer.” As he has shown, the genteel and self-righteous “new anti-Semitism” of so many English academic and literary contemporaries emanates from that immemorial stench.
Oh anti-Semitism is so important that the Times devotes four pieces to it, including this review by Francine Prose of the works and life of a fourth-rate author, Irene Nemirovsky, who did not come to terms with her own anti-Semitism (that we know of, anyway; a little grace) before she died in Auschwitz. If she’s so bad, why is the Times giving her space?
