Confucius Say: Shalom!You may be used to seeing Jews of all different ethnicities—black Jews, Arab Jews, Eastern European Jews, Latin American Jews—but East Asian Jews, especially Chinese Jews, don’t seem to pop up very often. There are Jews in China, though, and more than a few ethnically Chinese Jews. Here’s the scoop:

Jews have been in China since the 8th century, when they came in from Persia on the Silk Road. In 1163 the Jews were ordered to live in Kiafeng by the Emperor, and a Jewish community remained there for over seven hundred years. Some descendants of that community still live in Kiafeng and around China, but they don’t identify as Jews.

In the late 19th century, Jews began entering China from Russia, and during the 20th century, thousands of Jews sought safety in China as they fled from persecution and pogroms in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. Much of that community left during the Japanese annexation in 1931.

During World War II more than 18,000 Jews came to Shanghai seeking shelter from the Nazis. Eventually, the Japanese, who controlled Shanghai at the time, relocated the Jewish community to a ¾ square mile area (“the Shanghai Ghetto”) where they were kept until the end of the war. Still, Jews in China enjoyed a relatively high level of safety and security.

When World War II ended, many Jews left China for Israel, America, or Eastern Europe. Most of the remaining Jews left when the Communist regime began in 1949.

For just over fifty years there was no significant Jewish life in China, but in 2000, Rosh HaShana services were held at the Ohel Rachel Synagogue in Shanghai. Believe it or not, the Chinese government now recognizes Jews as an official Chinese ethnic group. You can go to shul in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong today, and daven with both native and international Jews. And in China, Orthodoxy and Reform Judaism play nice.

On the downside, China is rife with books that promise to help the reader make money “the Jewish way.” Contemporary Chinese anti-Semitism is a real concern for Jews there.

Learn more about Jews in China at the Shanghai Jewish Center website.

Related: On Being Black, White, and Jewish

Very Nice, Very Nice: how much? Borat is going to have to add one more point of interest to his travel guide to Kazakhstan: The country's first ever kosher restaurant. That’s right, a new kosher restaurant has made its debut as part of Kazakhstan’s grand “Seriously, we’re not anti-Semites!” campaign, generated in response to the (apparently false) contrary evidence provided by the Borat movie. Says Ran Ichay, Israeli ambassador to Kazakhstan, “This is the one place in the world where there is no anti-Semitism. It’s not only because of official government policy but also thanks to the natural openness of the people. And this is where Sacha Baron Cohen chose to set Borat! This is the most tolerant country I have ever seen.”

The restaurant’s grand opening was attended by top Kazakh diplomats and Israeli foreign ministers, surely providing a plethora of handshakes and feel-good photo-ops. It just goes to prove: nothing can bring cultures together like a nice pastrami on rye.

Related: Kosher GPS, China Jumps on Kosher Bandwagon, Ultra-Kosher Energy Drink for the Ultra-Orthodox Rock Star, Kosher Vending Machines

Farris Hassan, the young Iraqi-American from Florida who left home and snuck into the AP offices in Iraq in 2005, engaged in another interesting "immersion" project after returning.

At the height of the Israel-Hezbollah War, he went to Dearborn, Michigan, which has a large Arab community, wore a Star of David, and pretended to be a Jew named Jacob Malachi. He writes:

I traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, home of the largest concentration of Muslims in North America, and spent more than two weeks researching anti-Semitism in the American Muslim community. This issue affects me personally because although my parents are Muslim, the majority of my prep school and nearly all of my friends are Jewish. Having previously researched Muslims as a fellow member of their community, in Dearborn I wished to go further.

To that end, I immersed myself with the Muslims as Mr. JacobFarris Hassan Malachi, a Jew who wore a Star of David necklace but had an open mind and was trying to gain a greater understanding of the Muslim community. In irony, I was not the Jew investigating the Muslim community's hatred of his people, but rather I was the Muslim literally putting himself in the skin of a Jew in order to directly feel the hate in his own community. My research was especially provocative because at the time Israel was waging war in Lebanon and the world Muslim population was more feverishly incited than ever.

The story was about relationships: between religions, between nations, between local communities, and between individuals. I did not try to rile up my subjects by zealously attacking all things Muslim; rather I closely examined the effects of my efforts to build friendships with them from the position of being a member of their much touted arch nemesis – the Jews. I wondered whether they would receive me with grace in light of my curious and tolerant disposition or attack me in light of my Jewish identity.

I interviewed the religious leaders of two mosques and attended three Friday prayer services and two memorials for victims of Israel's war in Lebanon. I met with patrons of the Bint Jbeil (Hezbollah's capital) Club and journalists of the Arab American Newspaper. I rubbed shoulders with hundreds of angry Muslims at a peace rally in Detroit and thousands outside the White House, where I heard, unfortunately not for the first time, the chant "La illaha ilallah, Hezbollah! Hezbollah!"

Through this journey I discovered that American Muslims, with an emphasis on American, make a surprisingly strong distinction between Jews and Zionists. Walking amongst them in the streets, restaurants, and mosques while displaying a Star of David necklace and my school's Jewish Club t-shirt, I had expected to get beaten up within days. Instead, I was met with a curious hospitality. I found that Muslim anger draws not from a religious or cultural conflict, but almost solely from the political quagmire of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Certainly no clash of civilizations is tearing the world asunder. To the contrary, Muslims told me they felt a closer kinship with the religious culture of Judaism than of Christianity.

Still, ugly ideas reached me. I discovered once again that many Muslims hold elaborate conspiracy theories about Jews, which seemed to be instilled by the political context of their upbringing. The following misconceptions were conveyed to me: Israel is eradicating Lebanese civilians so that they can clear "open livingspace" for Zionists to settle; the beheadings, assassinations, suicide bombings, and other terrorist acts occurring in Iraq and across the Middle East are often orchestrated by Mossad agents in order to suppress and vilify the Muslim people; and under Zionist influence, President Bush is waging not a war on terrorism, but a war on Islam.

I tried to mitigate their paranoia and conspiracy theories by presenting myself as a Jew speaking on behalf of the peaceful and wholesome aspirations held by most of his people. At the beginning they were mostly suspicious and cynical, but after meeting a Jew who defied all stereotypes and advocated peace, love, and unity, their animosity subsided. By the end, they embraced me as one of their own. That accomplishment, of making a positive difference in the minds of others, by itself made my trip worthwhile.

When Hassan first traveled to Iraq, a number of right-wing websites, including Newsbusters (the right's version of Media Matters), suggested that Hassan must have been a closet jihadist looking to foment jihad. Never mind his declared allegiances and obvious decency, look at his name. His website, with archived writings, is here.

The Herzl/Rocky Mountain Hebrew Academy boys basketball team in Denver qualified for the regional championship, but won’t be able to play because the game was scheduled to take place on Shabbat. The Colorado High School Activities Association governs the league the boys play in, and has refused to move the game to a time when the team could play without breaking Shabbat, claiming that rearranging the schedule on the regional level would be too complicated.
The Herzl Tigers: don't roll on shabbos
The communications coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Amina Rubin, has come out with a statement supporting the Jewish team: “In a nation as religiously diverse as America, it is important that we all make the extra effort to accommodate the beliefs and practices of others. Student athletes should not be forced to choose between their faith and participation in sports." Several news sites chose to lead with the revolutionary idea that Muslims might support Jews in anything.

But there are some gaps in this story, like: Why is RMHA suddenly making a stink now that they’re in the finals. Why not push for a policy of no championship games on Saturdays? Why hasn’t this been an issue before now? And if, as the CHSAA claims, moving the game to late Saturday night would affect fifteen other teams and could mean more missed school time for kids on those teams, does the RMHA really have the right to demand religious accommodations?

On the other hand, incidents of anti-Semitism in Colorado are on the rise, so maybe it’s a good thing to have the Jewish community standing up for themselves.

Shakespeare: Jewess, hated by Jewesses, or both?The girls at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School in Hackney, East London, seem to have missed our post last week about how Shakespeare was a British Jewess. If they’d studied up on John Hudson’s theory that the work attributed to William Shakespeare was really written by Amelia Bassano Lanyer--a Jewish poetess from a family of Italian court musicians--they might not have refused to take a mandatory English exam on the work of Shakespeare.

Nine spirited students at Yesodey Hatorah left an entire exam on The Tempest blank in protest against what they feel is an Anti-Semitic portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. They’re supported by their parents and the school’s principal, Rabbi Abraham Pinter, even though their actions have caused the school to drop drastically in British school ratings, from a top-tier position to 274th.

Rabbi Pinter apparently thinks this is all very positive and has said that he's "really proud that our kids are prepared to take the consequences of their convictions and I think it is something that needs to be encouraged."

If the girls’ convictions had inspired them to wear pants instead of long skirts, Rabbi Pinter might be less proud. And if falling in school ratings causes a decrease in funding for future students, one has to wonder if the girls’ convictions are so great.

Related: Shakespeare Was a Jew. No, Really.

The weekend before last on Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol recommended what he took to be a terrifying campaign strategy for Hillary Clinton. "Run ads featuring an Ohio voter," he urged, "who says, 'I attended an Obama rally and was impressed. But then I did some research, and it turns out he's being advised by [cue sinister music] Zbigniew Brzezinski.'"^*

Come again? Kristol called this "the politics of fear," but who is going to be cowed into a terrified stupor at the mention of the name of a relatively obscure Carter administration official? Certainly not undecided Democratic primary voters in Ohio.

Kristol had confused the Ohio primary with the New York Sun editorial boardFrightened yet?: Zbigniew Brzezinski primary. In so doing, he offered a fascinating glimpse into the double- and triple-encrypted language he and his ideological comrades use to poison the public discourse over foreign policy generally, and policy towards Israel specifically.

The targets and objectives of this witch-smelling campaign are so various, widespread, and susceptible to instantaneous Eurasia-Eastasia revisionism, that trying to pin down just what the expected Pavlovian response to (say) the name "Brzezinski" is supposed to be --- and what mission is served and what enemy defeated by eliciting that response --- is the political equivalent of trying simultaneously to measure the position and trajectory of an electron.

And yet over the past several months, a discernible pattern of attack has emerged within the white noise. As Barack Obama's presidential ambitions have picked up steam, numerous American supporters of the most aggressive, militantly irredentist factions of Israeli society have engaged in a campaign of plausibly-deniable innuendo aimed at creating and propagating the meme that Obama has an animus against the Jewish state, and in turn, an animus against the Jewish people.

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The Myth: Someone has published the minutes from a meeting of a bunch of Jewish elders who are plotting world domination and discuss the various way they plan to manipulate other peoples, economies, and governments. It has widely been used to fuel anti-Semitic sentiment.

Jews As Snakes: if only we were on a plane... Last year I had a scary experience at Vanderbilt where a professor started telling the class that the Elders of Zion were a religious group. I stepped in and immediately set the record straight, but even as I was talking I realized I didn’t know quite as much about the hoax as I’d like to.

There are some great online sources for debunking this myth. There’s always Wikipedia, which does a great job of giving background on the original document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with a long and very well-cited article:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian: "Протоколы сионских мудрецов", or "Сионские протоколы", see also other titles) is an antisemitic and anti-Zionist plagiarism and literary forgery first published in 1903 in Russian, in Znamya; it alleges a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination.

"The Protocols" (the most brief title by which the text is known) is an early example of contemporary conspiracy theory literature, and takes the form of a speech describing how to dominate the world, the need to control the media, finance, replace traditional social order, etc. It is one of the best known and discussed examples of literary forgery, and a hoax.

The text was popularized by those opposed to Russian revolutionary movement, and was disseminated further after the revolution of 1905, becoming known worldwide after the 1917 October Revolution. It was widely circulated in the West in 1920 and thereafter. The Great Depression and the rise of Nazism were important developments in the history of the Protocols, and the hoax continued to be published and circulated despite its debunking.

The United State Holocaust Museum has a really nice page about the Protocols and all of the anti-Semitism they’ve inspired from their genesis at the turn of the 20th century through the Holocaust and to today.

Though the Protocols have been debunked over and over, they’re far from out of favor. There was a New York Times article about the Protocols in 2006 called The Anti-Semitic Hoax That Refuses to Die, and documentary called the Protocols of Zion about the rise of anti-Semitism after September 11th. Finally, there’s a Snopes page about a similarly anti-Semitic blood libel in Saudi Arabia that claims Jews use Christian blood to make hamentaschen. Snopes mentions the recent reprinting of the Protocols in an Egyptian newpaper.

Steve Cohen was elected to Congress in 2006 to represent the Memphis, TN district Harold Ford had abandoned in his unsuccessful bid for promotion to the Senate. Cohen is the first Jewish member of Tennessee's congressional delegation, and the first white Democrat to represent Memphis since the Jim Crow era.

Cohen's views are fairly conventionally left-liberal, with a tilt towards issues of particular concern to his majority African-American constituency. Thus far, his highest profile legislation is a bill requiring the US government to formallySo much for post-racial America apologize for slavery and racial segregation. He made headlines for himself shortly after his election, when he tried (and failed) to become a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Though he wasn't accepted into the CBC, he earned himself a spot on Stephen Colbert's "Better Know a District" series that I won't spoil by describing in any way (just watch it).

Nonetheless, from the beginning of his 2006 campaign, some members of the Black Baptist Ministerial Association decided that a white Jew is unfit to represent Memphis, and targeted Cohen accordingly:

Inciting tension between African-Americans and Cohen was the aim of several members of the Black Baptist Ministerial Association who took Cohen to task last summer for his support of federal hate crimes legislation. The real motive behind the attack was revealed in later comments by at least one of those involved.

"He's not black," said Rev. Robert Poindexter of Mt. Moriah Baptist Church, "and he can't represent me, that's just the bottom line."

This year, Cohen faces a primary challenge from Nikki Tinker, an African-American labor lawyer. In order to boost Tinker's chances to unseat Cohen, George Brooks, an African-American baptist minister from Murfreesboro (which is not part of Cohen's district) distributed a flier attacking Cohen. It claims that Jews in general and Cohen in particular hate Jesus, and that "Memphis Christians must unite and support ONE Black Christian" in the upcoming election.

Thus far, Tinker will not denounce the flier.

Cohen is a supporter of Barack Obama and believes Obama's successes are "showing us that Americans have gotten beyond race." In Memphis, that's unfortunately not the case.

Last week Jewcy reported on a series of anti-Obama e-mails, rapidly spreading in the Jewish community, that accuse the "Jew-hating" senator of hiding his true Muslim faith, supporting Louis Farrakhan and favoring Palestinians over Israelis. (Andrew Sullivan linked to the post.)

Yesterday a number of prominent Jewish leaders -- from the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and many other organizations -- condemned the e-mails. Addressing the accusations, Obama criticized Farrakhan's extremism and reasserted his own Christian beliefs. To be fair, Obama's church is supportive of Farrakhan, its minister is a firebrand, and the senator's continued membership could become a colossal political mistake.

Nevertheless we continue to wonder: are the e-mails an orchestrated disinformation campaign or simply the ravings of paranoids? (And if it's the former, let's throw objectivity to the wind and blame that scheming, power-hungry Machiavellian mastermind Dennis Kucinich.)

Again: if you have received any of these e-mails, or have any information regarding their origins, please share in the comments section below.

Over at TNR, Jamie Kirchick (who also contributes to Jewcy) has a brutal piece on U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the libertarian antiwar candidate seeking the GOP presidential nomination. Paul has raised a stunning amount of money from Americans with very different politics -- liberals and conservatives alike -- but Kirchick believes that Paul has hidden his true beliefs from the public, and presents evidence that Paul has a long history of bigotry and conspiracy-mongering. The Paul campaign claims that the congressman did not write the newsletters that Kirchick quotes.

(In all fairness, "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" would make good names for New York City.)

 Related: Ron Paul's Jewish Problem

If you caught the first installment of Hostess Confidential, you'll remember that I work at a well-known restaurant in Manhattan's Union Square. It's a fast-paced environment with demanding customers who have no use for wait-lists, which means I witness a lot of scandalous behavior. Bon Appetit.

It's 4:30. I’m standing at the host stand and I've been there for six hours. I'm on for another six and working "a dirty double," our industry's name for a double-shift. I haven't eaten a thing and I feel dizzy and nauseated. It's slow, and two bartenders from the restaurant next-door have been sitting at the bar for over an hour, and I swear, if I have to hear how "full" or "round" another wine is, I'm going to start dry-heaving.

Red Wine: Brings on Bad Behavior. Their names are Frank and Eddie. Frank is a tall, waifish, blonde who is trapped in the eighties: he wears skinny pants, a skinny tie, and thick framed glasses. Eddie is scruffy and bearded and wears his suit with a smile.

Frank, on his fifth glass of wine says "So I met my girl's family during Hanukkah."

"Your girl is Jewish?" Eddie asks.

"Oh yeah, she comes from this big Jewish family. And it's Hanukkah so they've got this huge spread of food: roast beef, smoked salmon, matzo ball soup, roasted potatoes, two different desserts, I mean, there was so much food—Jews, they're such big eaters, it's disgusting. So, her grandma starts serving me, you know, big Jewish portions, and I've got to eat it, because grandmas are the matriarchs of Jewish families. So I’m buttering up grandma, you know, lots of nods and uh-huhs while she's talking because, old Jewish ladies don't know when to shut-up—"

"Right, bitches don't stop." Eddie says, rolling his eyes.

"So, now, Grandma loves me. It's smooth sailing from now on. I'm proposing to my girl next week." Frank says.

"Congratulations. Does that make you half-Jewish?" Eddie asks.

"Dude, I will NEVER be Jewish." Frank says.

Say Anything: Except at a bar. Finally Frank had said something that I agreed with. He will never be Jewish. His antisemitism and chauvinism were grating on me and what I found even more grating was knowing that I would have to deal with Frank, and others like him, again.

Frank, like many, think that anything goes at the bar. They believe they that have the right to say or do anything because they are paying for their drinks. What they don't understand is, they don't pay people like me, people who work there, enough to listen to their racism and bigotry. In fact no amount of money could pay for this. Furthermore, when we tell our managers that a customer is being obnoxious, we have to continue working and serving them. And, at the end of the day, we are the ones that have to leave the restaurant with a foul taste in our mouths.

I wanted to say something to Frank, but Jose, my manager, came over to me and said, "It's time for you to go on your break. I'll watch the door."

Relieved that I was finally going to get something to eat and leave Frank behind, I gathered my coat and purse and braved the New York winter. Walking outside, I was left with one thought: Think about what you say at the bar. Others are listening.

Mitchell Cohen has a fine essay in this month's Dissent about the areas of congruence, in style, rhetoric and fallacious logic, that exist between so-called "anti-Zionists" and classical anti-Semites. Cohen concludes:

If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you’ve done no more than cluck “well, yes, very bad about Darfur”;

if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won’t blame ‘in the final analysis’ on Israelis;

if your sneer at the Zionists doesn’t sound a whole lot different from American neoconservative sneers at leftists;

then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so, by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who won’t let you get away with a self-exonerating formula—“I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic”—to prevent scrutiny. If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don’t use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.

Cohen spends a few paragraphs debunking the latterday absurdities of Tony Judt, who thinks that the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a recent phenomenon, and that the notion of a Jewish state is an "anachronism" when in fact it very much of the moment. I respect Judt as an historian who provided a masterful analysis of European Stalinism. As Cohen rightly points out, this analysis was deeply enriched an understanding of how Moscow used "Zionist" as a code-word for Jew. The names Anna Pauker, Rudolph Slansky, Traicho Kostov and László Rajk may not resonate much anymore, but these were all undeviating Stalinists in charge of Soviet satellites, purged simply because of their Hebraic roots.

To understand Soviet anti-Semitism, one has to understand Stalin's lucubrations on the so-called National Question, the only work he ever produced as a pre-revolution Bolshevik that had any lasting policy impact. As a Georgian, Stalin knew that the tribalism that defined the Caucasus was anathema not only to Communist internationalism but to bourgeois nationalism as well. The "rootless cosmopolitan" was therefore the worst kind of subversive -- someone without organic ties to a people or state. It did not help, of course, that more Jews became Mensheviks than Bolsheviks, especially in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. ("Filthy, circumcised Yid" was how Stalin once described Julius Martov, the leader of the Menshevik Party.)

Oftentimes, after World War II, the Kremlin would accuse a Jew of being simultaneously a Zionist, a Trotskyist, a Titoist, and a CIA agent, a congeries of interests that, if legitimate, would have made postwar history even more interesting than it was.

Of course, the real anachronism is the term Zionist itself, at least as it has come to mean a supporter of Israel. Zionism was a 19th and 20th century political movement that underwent multiple permutations and revisions yet always agitated for the founding of a homeland for the Jews. Now that that homeland exists and will continue to do so indefinitely, the movement has become obsolete. The messianic reactionaries of Gush Emunim or other Greater Israel chauvinists are not, properly speaking, Zionists any more than Rush Limbaugh is a "rebel colonist" as opposed to an American jingoist. Ditto the most uncompromising elements of AIPAC.

When a conservative calls a liberal who believes in socialized healthcare a socialist he is resorting to a rhetorical flourish that indicates his own tendentiousness rather than the true politics of the liberal. Socialist, when used pejoratively, conjures all sorts of images of undesirable, radical behavior. Propagators of the archaic and meaningless term Zionist are trying to conjure the same thing, but they are acting under a veil of ignorance that pretends Zionist is a polemical identifier no different than any other. Of course, there is no ethnic or racial component attached to socialist.

In fact, there is already a term in the lexicon to describe people who advocate the physical or demographic destruction of a state: anarchists. But those who target only Israel for such destruction seem to be, at their very best, selective or discriminating anarchists. And it's their discrimination that raises eyebrows and gets them into trouble.

For the past several months, the Jews of Turkey have been in the international spotlight. As Congress has debated the Armenian Genocide resolution, high-ranking Turkish officials have warned that Turkish Jews will be endangered if the resolution passes. And Jewish-American organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have repeatedly cited the predicament of Turkish Jews as reason to support Turkey's campaign of genocide denial.

In an effort to better understand the plight of Turkish Jewry, I interviewed several prominent scholars who have studied the community.

Ottoman Jews: Safety Through Loyalty

For 500 years, Jews have lived as a loyal minority in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire and the present-day Turkish republic. According to Turkish-Jewish scholar Rifat Bali, who has published several books on the history of Turkey's Jews, their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire allowed Turkish Jews to escape the tragic fate of the Empire's Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians.

"Turkish Jews were not involved in any sort of ethnic nationalism," says Bali. "The Zionist movement did not take root in Istanbul because the community leadership had witnessed the tragic fate of the Ottoman Armenians. [They] understood that the Ottoman leadership would perceive Zionism as a separatist nationalist movement and that this would have dire consequences. They therefore took an ‘anti-Zionist' position."

Like today's Turkish Jewish community, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire were utilized as international advocates for Turkish political goals. "Haim Nahum, the last Ottoman Chief Rabbi, was an ‘anti-Zionist' and a supporter of the Turkish Nationalist movement," says Bali. "He was sent by Mustafa Kemal to the USA and Europe for lobbying on behalf of the Kemalists."

Turkish Jews in the 20^th century: Loyal Scapegoats

Turkish political groups that fight bitterly on other issues find common ground in blaming Turkish Jews for the country's ills. "Turkey's Jews have been scapegoated by the Islamist movement which started to grow in 1946," say Bali. "In 1969, the National Order Party began propagating its Islamist National View ideology, which accused Jews and Zionism of being behind all the troubles of Turkey." And in the ‘70s, Turkey's Jews were hostage to the clash between Turkey's ultra-leftists and ultra-rightists.

Turkish Jews Today

Adopting Muslim Names to Escape Attention

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Alexander Lukashenko, the wannabe despot in charge of Belarus, has fairly been described as "Europe's last dictator". Of course, like any self-respecting authoritarian these days, he is fond of the veneer of accountability, and does submit himself for re-election now and again; at the last one, in March 2006, he won well over 80% of the vote, albeit with the help of a compliant state-run media that refused to mention his opponent, Alexander Milinkevich (who coincidentally has a strange tendency to get picked up by police every few weeks, accused of everything from drunk driving to drug trafficking). With admirable frankness, Lukashenko later admitted to rigging the elections - but claimed, brilliantly, that he'd had no choice but to fiddle the numbers, because the true figure - 93.5% - was just too embarrassing.

Lukashenko has shut down opposition newspapers, used the riot police to break up unlicensed rallies (try getting a license), and rewritten the constitution to remove term limits from the Presidency which he has now graced for 13 years. He presides over a Soviet-style command economy and a secret police that would have Vladimir Putin drooling. And he gives good megalomaniac, too; TV stations get memos advising them on approved colour schemes for their news sets, and his official website is a joy to behold ("A.G. Lukashenko is notable for his in-depth understanding of events, hard work, sense of duty, realism, fairness and fidelity to principle"). Yep, when it comes to tinpot dictatorship, ‘Lucky' Lukashenko is old school.

He's also resolutely anti-capitalist and anti-American, which explains why he likes to seek out the company of nutballs like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and it is therefore unsurprising that a small but vocal group on the fringes of the Left are quite fond of him. Witness Jonathan "Darfur ain't that bad" Steele in the Guardian newspaper before last year's rigged election, bigging up the moustachioed strongman:

Would you expect a European leader who has presided over a continual increase in real wages for several years, culminating in a 24% rise over the past 12 months, to be voted out of office? What if he has also cut VAT, brought down inflation, halved the number of people in poverty in the past seven years, and avoided social tensions by maintaining the fairest distribution of incomes of any country in the region?

Of course not, you would say. In Bill Clinton's famous phrase, "it's the economy, stupid". Unless there are overriding issues of political or personal insecurity - incipient civil war, ethnic cleansing, mass arrests, pervasive crime on the streets - most people will vote according to their pocketbooks. And so it is likely to be in Belarus in nine days' time.

Why, then, are western governments, echoed by most western media, developing a crescendo of one-sided reporting and comment on one of Europe's smallest countries?

And so on. Even Steele doesn't go so far as to suggest that Lukashenko is a socialist's wet dream, but the message is pretty clear; my enemy's enemy is my buddy, and what's a couple of jailed opposition leaders between friends?

Well, Lukashenko's back in the news this week, but not, sad to report, for the reasons he might have chosen. No matter; among the lunatic left, his kudos is unlikely to have been harmed too much by the unguarded comments he made to journalists last week.

Talking to a group of Russian journalists on October 12 about the past living conditions of the southeastern town of Babruysk, Lukashenka said, "It was scary to enter, it was a pigsty. That was mainly a Jewish town -- and you know how Jews treat the place where they are living."

"Look at Israel, I've been [there]. I really don't want to offend anyone -- but they don't care much about, say, grass being cut, like in Moscow," Lukashenka said, in comments broadcast live on national radio.

Lukashenka also called on Jews "with money" to return to Babruysk, once a thriving Jewish center. Last year, the town, as the host of a harvest festival, received a large injection of state cash. [...]

Valeri Karbalevitch, a political commentator at RFE/RL's Belarusian Service, said Lukashenka has made anti-Semitic statements in the past, for instance comparing dishonest oligarchs with Jews, or likening his critics to people with "hooked noses." [...] But this time, Karbalevitch said he believes that Lukashenka's comments were "simply a slip of the tongue."

No doubt those who rushed to condemn Martin Amis for his rather unreconstructed comments about Muslims will be equally quick to decry Lukashenko's "slip of the tongue". Or maybe they'll claim that he was mistranslated; he didn't say "pigsty", he said "manger", it's all a State Department conspiracy, actually a charming fellow, blah blah blah. You know the drill. Anyway, it's not anti-Semitic to point out that the Zionists don't maintain their gardens properly. (I mean, what?)

The fallback position will no doubt be that Lucky is more Borat than Ahmadinejad; a casual anti-Semite, not a potentially dangerous player on the world stage. (Which of us, after all, has not accidentally referred to hook-nosed Jews living in ‘pigsties' from time to time?) Well, maybe. Oh, wait, here's something interesting; a speech he gave last Thursday.

Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko on Thursday declared his government 'willing to consider' a return of nuclear weapons to the country, and hinted a US plan to deploy missiles to Central Europe might well serve as a catalyst. Asked about his attitude towards a Washington proposal to base anti-missile missiles in East Europe, Lukashenko responded: 'Belarus would react extremely negatively.'

Great.

Hey, don't sweat it. The swastika is just a plus sign doing cartwheels, and the noose was a last-minute alternative to a don't-come-a-knockin' necktie.

NEW YORK -- Police are continuing to investigate an anti-semitic message that included a swastika found etched into a bathroom wall at Columbia University, just two days after a noose was discovered hanging from the door of a professor at Teachers College.In a message to the Columbia community, President Lee Bollinger said he was saddend by the second incident of hate in a week.

Israel's Foreign Minister visits Brooklyn Heights, and suddenly synagogues are awash with swastikas and other Jew-baiting and anti-Israel (not that there's anything wrong with that!) slogans.

In response, churches, mosques and synagogues have shown some inter-faith solidarity in the form of this Monotheism-or-Bust banner:

It good to see a community that's lately been the sight of a happy reverse exodus of Manhattan Jewry -- including yours truly -- come together in this way. But hasn't anyone told the multi-denominational clerisy of Cranberry Street that anti-Semitism is just an outmoded Edward Gorey sketch in the collective imagination of Marty Peretz, Jeff Goldberg, Richard Perle, Ron Rosenbaum, etc. etc.?

Former French Prime Minister Raymond Barre died today. The vast majority of obituaries seem to neglect or play down an important part of this man’s extraordinary ‘intellectual rigour’, as one member of the current government described Barre’s character. Raymond Barre happened to be a very rigourous anti-Semite, too, as you might recall from Beth’s reporting here on Jewcy.

According to Le Monde (the main French newspaper, roughly left-wing), it is only Barre’s last comments on the ‘Jewish lobby’ that caused ‘a wave of indignation’ in France. This is of course better than either the New York Times, which doesn’t mention anything at all about anti-Semitism. And it’s of course much better thanLe Figaro (mainstream right-wing paper) or the BBC, both of which have a talent for making the ‘accusations of anti-Semitism’ sound really… fake.

The BBC employs nice soft pharases like ‘he suggested’ when talking about what Barre qualifies as ‘a “Jewish lobby”’ -actually, he spoke of the Jewish lobby.The British journalists also qualify Maurice Papon, a man convicted of complicity of crimes against humanity, and Bruno Gollnisch, an extreme-right wing French politician convicted of Holocaust denial, of being ‘controversial’ figures. Somehow condemnation to prison sentences (albeit suspended) and support garnered only from the most extreme quarters of society doesn’t seem to me to make someone ‘controversial’. Maybe it’s just something specific about anti-Semitic crimes and offences: while you wouldn’t call a common criminal/offender ‘controversial’, you can do that about people whose attacks against a particular group seem to be forgotten as soon as they pass away if not before.

 

Note: I’m using the term anti-Semitism to refer more precisely to anti-Jewish behaviour, since it seems that’s what it what coined for; but in this case it doesn’t really make a difference -it’s pretty safe to assume someone like Barre hated all kinds of Semites, and his defence of Papon by necessity also embraced the anti-Arab actions of the latter.

Last Friday marked the first anniversary of the most traumatic day in the history of Seattle's Jewish community. It was the day that a deranged Naveed Haq barged into the Jewish federation's downtown offices, proclaimed his anger at Israel for its treatment of Arabs, and began shooting everything in sight. At the end of his rampage Pam Waechter, the campaign director was dead and five other female employees were wounded. The hatred and insanity of this massacre are garden variety as far as the world is concerned--this happens every day. But what isn't garden variety is this community's response, including the victims and the family of the perpetrator.

Seattle is a city that prides itself on its openness and tolerance and it proved it in this case. On the day of Pam Waechter's funeral an Arab-American representative of Haq's family hand delivered a letter from Haq's parents expressing profound sorrow and regret to the Jewish community. The victims, in turn, did not shout for vengeance or the death penalty. In fact, several victims families said explicitly and publicly that they did not the DA to file a death penalty charge.

Layla Bush, most seriously injured federation victim (Karen Ducey/Seattle PI)The most severely injured victim was Layla Bush with bullet wounds to her abdomen and shoulders. One bullet barely missed tearing into her heart. She walks with a cane, cannot stand for more than an hour and has nine therapy appointments each week. Yet these are her feelings now:

"I just don't want people to forget how much damage hate can do...Nothing positive comes from hatred." Bush said executing Haq would be "too easy for him." She reiterated that view Thursday, saying she favored life imprisonment.

In the aftermath of the shooting, "what made me mad is not him, but that someone with a mental history like that can get guns..." Growing up in rural Florida, she completed gun-safety classes and shot beer bottles off fence posts. She once owned a 9 mm Beretta. "I feel that handguns are made for killing people," she said. "They're not made for hunting."

Think what an extraordinary attitude it takes to make the following statement about her volunteer work at Harborview Medical Center:

We answer questions and talk with patients who have just been recently injured," she said. "It feels good for me to just give back. I feel like I've taken so much."

Norm Maleng, the recently deceased Republican DA did not file a first degree murder charge. He reviewed ten years of Haq's mental health records and determined that a lesser murder charge was more appropriate.

While one might expect the victims of such a trauma to refuse to return to their jobs almost all have (though several cannot work full time due to their injuries). The federation in turn has raised $1.3 million to entirely redesign the interior of its former offices so that the thoughts of victims or any other community member will not linger on that tragic day and space.

It seems to me that there are many places in the world where hate rages which could learn from Seattle's example. It is true that shootings of this nature are extremely rare here so one might argue that we have the luxury of being able to respond to such tragedy differently. But are we really that different? I don't know. It seems to me that a response to murderous hatred that offers more of the same is the easy way out. A response to hate that offers sober reflection and emotional engagement is much harder.

The Kippah: Separating Man From God For Centuries!A fascinating, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tidbit in Sunday Times’ Milgrom-Elcott/Dorfman wedding announcement, in which the groom, Aaron Dorfman, (an “edgy” gentleman who’s “...pierced in three places that I can see,” according to the bride’s father) discusses his choice to wear a kippah:

He explained that he started wearing a skullcap while teaching a class on prejudice. His students had pointed out that Jews can usually hide their minority status, but African-Americans cannot. “Jews can pass,” he said, “so I took away the option of passing.”

Dorfman’s bride’s identification of her groom as a “thoughtful, serious, engaged person” in this context certainly rings true -- the personal-is-political wallop of choosing not to “pass” in America is an interesting, righteous, complicated one.

Meanwhile, regardless: Mazel Tov, guys!

It's all fun and games when the guy pronouncing it Vagner is sitting across from you on Louis XIV furniture (Hat tip: Andrew)

Last week I linked to an old Houston Chroncile report about a newsletter sent out by Ron Paul's Texas senatorial campaign in 1996 that made not-so-flattering remarks about blacks ("If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be") and suggested -- rather tepidly by today's standards -- that Israel exerts an alarmingly high influence in setting the foreign policy agenda of the United States ("By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government").

Paul's supporters, jumping on the wide circulation of this archived article, were quick to point out that the newsletter was not written by the candidate himself but by an anonymous staffer. This hardly exonerated Paul, however, as he must have either seen the document and approved it before it got mailed out or, what is perhaps worse, simply chose not to review public statements attached to his own candidacy yet formulated by his subordinates. Further, he took his sweet time in repudiating the content of the newsletter -- it was only when he was asked about it by a reporter with a long memory at the Texas Monthly that Paul chose to offer a weak mea culpa and explain the provenance of his noxious comments. You can follow the whole affair at this site.

Well, Ryan Sager at the New York Sun (most of the blogosphere got the Houston Chroncile tip from Sager and Wonkette) has since examined Paul's comments on his decade-old solecism based on what the wildcard presidential candidate has since burbled to Reason's David Weigl. Here's Paul now:

I'd have to have you show to me that I wrote it because that doesn't sound like my language, and in campaigns, some things get into newspapers that aren't actually correct. But I wouldn't back away from saying that AIPAC is very influential in our political process. That's a little bit different than saying the Israeli government, but I think that the Israeli position is very influential, which is very interesting because some of you may have seen this—just recently, there was an article out that studied which groups of people were most opposed to the Iraq War. And the assumption is that AIPAC is in control of things, and they control the votes, and they get everybody to vote against anything that would diminish the war. Yet the group that is most opposed to the Iraq War are the American Jews. Seventy-seven percent are now opposed to the war, which is a powerful message.

And here's Sager in response:

I consider the statement recounted from the newsletter above objectively anti-Semitic — whether he wrote it or stood by his staffer's words. Again, it was: "By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government." Mr. Paul didn't address that statement directly in his response to the question from Mr. Weigel, though he doesn't seem to be backing away from it.

Why is this anti-Semitic? Because any criticism of Israel or America's alliance with Israel is anti-Semitic? Hardly. It's an anti-Semitic statement because it plays directly into classic anti-Semitic tropes, as regards Jews controlling the world and controlling nations through a Jewish conspiracy. Even in his response to Mr. Weigel, Mr. Paul seems to be reiterating this notion of AIPAC controlling Congress, saying, "the assumption is that AIPAC is in control of things, and they control the votes, and they get everybody to vote against anything that would diminish the war."

What's more, while Mr. Paul is quite consistent and criticizes lobbies of all kinds, the statement ascribed to him singles out the Israeli government (not AIPAC) as "by far the most powerful lobby" of the "bad sort." This sort of exaggeration (what about the Saudi government? AARP? the farm lobby? the public-employees unions?), again, plays into anti-Semitic tropes.

First of all, there's a quaint silliness in the expression "objectively anti-Semitic," which, if I were being as radar-sensitive as Sager, I might add bears an adverbial resemblance to the kind of charge Stalinists used to level against radical opponents: Trotskyists or social democrats were "objectively fascist," and so on. Now, it is true that one can be "objectively anti-war" by believing strongly in the need for military confrontation but opposing what one finds to be the illegal or immoral means for having it. But anti-Semitism is, by definition, an unmistakably subjective disposition whether it's further qualified by terms like "mild" or "casual." In any case, it represents an irrational antipathy to Jews. Can Paul, on the evidence of his statement, be accused of harboring such an antipathy?

No. If there is some cause for concern or suspicion in Paul's worldview it's that it hardly encompasses the world at all -- he, like plenty of libertarian ultras, suffers from a hoary but not-altogether-dishonorable brand of American isolationism that deplores keeps store by Washington's warning against "foreign entanglements" but conveniently elides the fact that the U.S. has had them since the 18th century.

Given Paul's fatuous but telling remark during the last Republican debate that the U.S. may have precipitated 9/11 by "bombing Iraq" (notice how even the antiwar right can conflate al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein), it's obvious that the only sand he hasn't got his head in is the Middle Eastern variety. Unlike, say, Jewcy's latest dialogician Justin Raimondo, he simpy hasn't got the attention span or feverish interest in Israeli affairs to believe in a grand Jewish conspiracy.

So Sager's raised eyebrow can come down an inch or two. Paul's use of "Israeli government" in lieu of AIPAC simply makes him another misguided or semi-informed pol who sees the two entities as perfectly interchangeable. (He should read this magazine sometime.) Either term would have led to the current Mearsheimer/Walt knock-off controversy surrounding his non-starter campaign for president.

Also, it's disingenuous for Sager to write: Even in his response to Mr. Weigel, Mr. Paul seems to be reiterating this notion of AIPAC controlling Congress, saying, "the assumption is that AIPAC is in control of things, and they control the votes, and they get everybody to vote against anything that would diminish the war."  It's clear from Paul's next sentence, which begins with the word "yet" and proceeds to show that the majority of American Jews are against the war that AIPAC favors, that he's juxtaposing his own current position against the conventional wisdom. Paul still suffers from the same category problem of equating some monolithic American Jewish opinion with the dread "Lobby," but again, he could have got that from reading the New York Review of Books, which can hardly be described as an anti-Semitic journal.

More worrisome, in my opinion, is what Paul -- or his camp, anyway -- once said about blacks: young criminals of a rich, dark hue sure do run fast. He'd have needed to mention the omnipresence of long noses or horns in the land of milk and honey to make his remark about Israel even remotely as scandalous as that.

 A post over at Haaretz questions whether there is a proper place for stereotypes. A couple of weeks ago, Michael Ray Richardson, a basketball player who went to Hapoel Ramat Gan more than a decade ago after being banned by the NBA for drug use, and who is now a coach, was suspended from a training session for the Albany Patroons team. Why? Well, one of the reasons is "anti-Semitic remarks." 

"I've got big-time lawyers. Big-time Jew lawyers," he said in response to a question about the renewal of his contract. When he was told that there are some people who would be offended by his comments, he responded: "Are you kidding me? They've got the best security system in the world. Have you ever been to an airport in Tel Aviv? They're real crafty. Listen, they are hated all over the world, so they've got to be crafty. They've got a lot of power in this world, you know what I mean? Which I think is great. I don't think there's nothing wrong with it. If you look in most professional sports, they're run by Jewish people. If you look at a lot of most successful corporations and stuff, more businesses, they're run by Jewish [people]."

Okay, so my jaw dropped, literally, when I read this -- but I have to say that it was not accompanied by that sickening feeling I get when I hear something "anti-Semitic" spoken through a filter of hate and contempt for Jewish people. Okay, so the guy sounds like a moron and someone needs to take him aside and explain why what he said is so wrong, but you also get the sense that he thinks Jews are rad -- he's just ignorant and clearly uneducated regarding many things (note his annoying use of the double negative: "I don't think therWhat We're Really About: Taking over the worlde's nothing wrong with it").

On the other hand, part of the reason for Richardson's suspension also included an anti-gay slur he hurled at a fan, so clearly there's some hate churning around under all that ignorance. And, god forbid we find out he's got a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion stashed away.

The post also gets into the difference between stereotypes and generalizations, and the complicated nature of both:

The use of generalizations is perhaps not something we should be proud of, because generalizations are necessarily simplistic. But they are also a basic human need that allow us to compartmentalize the world's complexities. . . .

And in the almost futile quest, because after all, generalizations will not disappear, we must carefully choose the events worthy of our attention. "Jews are smart" is nice to hear. Hearing that they are "crafty" depends on the context. There are also some businesses that are not "successful" but it's hard to argue. And in any case, here's another stereotype that would be a pity to lose on the long and winding road to eliminating anti-Semitism: They, the Jews, have an excellent sense of humor.

But I'm still unclear . . . is it, or is it not, okay to say "Jews are smart and successful, and they have an amazing sense of humor"? A while back, I was talking to a friend about my adventures on JDate. "What's he like?" she asked of a particular man with whom I had shared a few conversations. I shrugged my shoulders and responded, "Smart, funny, successful, a little neurotic -- typical Jewish guy."

Am I bad?

I'd like to think not, but my friend, who is not Jewish, raised her eyebrows and said she would be "hesitant" to label any group of people as "neurotic." But it's not a bad thing, I suggested to her, citing a list of some of the most neurotic and endearing Jewish writers and artists, Woody Allen included. It wasn't an argument I was going to win, though it irritated me immensely. She still thinks I'm a bad person, I think.

This past weekend I somehow managed to end up in a Catholic church in Grosse Pointe, Michigan—not once, but two times. I had happily agreed to travel home with a girlfriend for the weekend to hang out with her family. I just didn’t realize I would be expected to attend two Catholic services with the family: a bread-blessing service and an Easter mass. 

And is if it weren’t awkward enough that I—a Midrash-loving Jew by choice who spends her days cornering rabbis, studying the Holocaust, and figuring out if there is a Jewish novel she hasn’t yet read—found myself in the cathedral of the allegedly risen one on the most holiest of Christian holidays, it turns out that this was a community comprised mostly of Polish people. This was particularly unnerving for me, and though it will sound terrible to say, I’m going to say it anyway:

 I am uncomfortable around large groups of Poles or Ukrainians.   You'll Find the Lost Tribe Right About Here: German Map of Poland, 1942

There—it’s all out in the open now. I know it isn’t right, nor is it politically correct. Maybe I’ve watched Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and read Jan Gross’s Neighbors one too many times to pretend that the big fat elephant in the room—that is, Polish citizens’ overwhelming contribution to the Holocaust and countless anti-Semitic acts of violence against Jews even after WWII; and the inability of many Poles (and Poland) to take responsibility for the parts they individually played in the greatest atrocity of the twentieth century—is not there. I mean, let’s face it—Germany has done a hell of a lot more than Poland when it comes to acknowledging national, collective guilt. Now, I know of course that the Polish community I found myself in was also a community of Americans, and probably good people at that. I am also aware that there are countless Polish individuals who are counted among the righteous gentiles. And, I also happen to know, and am friends with, many Polish people who abhor anti-Semitism and make a conscious effort to speak out against it.

But still . . . on Saturday night as we ate dinner in one of those hole-in-the-wall Polish restaurants—I am uncomfortable with Polish history but I don’t mind Polish food, especially dill pickle soup and potato pierogis, which remind me of Yonah Schimmel knishes—I couldn’t help but pick out the ones who looked like they could’ve been guards at death camps, or cruel Polish peasants at Jedwabne. There was one little old Jewish man in the Polish restaurant, sitting in a corner, who befriended me when he overheard me use the term “midrash.” We quickly banded together. 

Continue reading...

As someone who's groped his way through the bramble patch of artistic anti-Semitism, I had a natural sympathy with Paul Dean in his review of Craig Raine's new biography of T.S. Eliot. Admirably, if also a touch self-consciously, Dean refrains from the inevitable "issue" for as long as possible. That Eliot disliked the Jews is so hackneyed a notion as to induce no shock or scandalous reply at this stage.

I have left until last the matter of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, not wanting it to swamp the review. Raine opposes the case first made extensively by Anthony Julius in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996) and since taken up by Ricks, George Steiner, James Fenton, and others. In brief, Raine contends that Eliot’s detractors have distorted his comments in After Strange Gods (but his suppression of the book is surely a material fact), have failed to see that the alleged anti-Semitic lines come in poems which are dramatic monologues (and hence are not authorial utterances), and have discounted Eliot’s explicit denials of malice and some later statements supporting Jews. Raine admits that clinching evidence for his defense is lacking, though without mentioning that this is partly because the Eliot estate is dragging its feet over publishing the relevant volumes of the poet’s correspondence. He wants to enter a “plea of mitigation.” The element of special pleading here arouses unease. My hunch, for what it’s worth, is that Eliot, when newly arrived in England, absorbed the casual anti-Semitism fashionable in the social circle to which he aspired to belong, and that when he realized the truth about the Holocaust (whenever that was) he felt, for whatever reason, unable either to repudiate his earlier views or to state his new ones plainly. It was too late to alter his poems, which had too long been in the public domain, but he put conciliatory statements into circulation as opportunity allowed. It seems very difficult to maintain that he had simply never been anti-Semitic at all.

Evelyn Waugh, too, tried to make up for a lifetime of bigotry in his Sword of Honor trilogy by giving half-cocked tributes to God's chosen people, of whom World War II, at battle's end, was seen to have been a necessary rescue operation. But Dean is surely right: Eliot actively scorned the Jews as innate subversives who were irreconcilable with his medieval Christian utopia.

The poetry comes away cleaner than the criticism in this respect. People who take objection to "Gerontion," for example, quote,

My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

-- forgetting that the speaker here is an "old man," which Eliot himself decidedly was not in 1922 when these lines were put down. Only a philistine automatically assumes the opinions of a fictive character are those of its author, even if, as Eliot went to great trouble to show later on, he thought much worse of the Jews than his poetic creations did. "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" -- try harder, please. Aim also for originality: Shakespeare had the first and final word on tracing the sinking rot of Venice to the bearded bondsman. Or compare the Jewish figures in Eliot's poetry to "Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant / Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants" in "The Waste Land." No one ever reads this description as anti-Greek sentiment.

"Free-thinking" is the key modifier of "Jews" in Eliot's shabby polemic After Strange Gods. All you need to know about the poet's anti-Semitism is that it was ineluctable from his suspicion of political radicalism, and in this way rather resembles the paranoia that gripped Stalin in the years before his death. Eliot much admired the Kremlin mountaineeer, not just as a wartime ally but as a liquidator of intellectuals and "rootless cosmopolitans." (Churchill, though he certainly made up for it, felt the same way about Stalin because he killed more Communists than Hitler ever could.)

Eliot was the one who got Faber and Faber to reject Orwell's Animal Farm for fear that its obvious anti-Communism might offend Uncle Joe. Orwell got the last laugh, however. In 1984, he has O'Brien tell Winston Smith that his future is the ultimate waste land, by his activities with Julia in the underground he'll be reduced to "splinters of bone and handfuls of dust."

There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I would also add to any further discussion of Eliot's feelings toward the Jews how the famed New York intellectuals, coalescent around Partisan Review in the 30's and 40's, were completely enthralled by the haunting, apocalyptic symbols of modernism. Irving Howe said that part of Eliot's appeal was his biography: a shabby-genteel banker from St. Louis ups and moves to the world capital of London and redefines himself as -- though I normally shudder to use this term, I think it's actually the best one in this instance -- the voice of his generation. That was the boot-strapper tale par excellence, consonant with the poor but precocious immigrant's dream to "make it" in America.

The history of socialism is filled with these intriguing concatenations between leftist politics and reactionary art. Cultural conservatives are excellent at identifying the angst and anxieties of an age, and in the service of painting or literature, they rise to the level of diagnosticians. The revolutionaries who tilt against them hope to administer the cure. Trotsky (pay attention here, Dan Freeman) famously wrote of the Futurist poet Mayakovsky that he was greatest as a poet precisely where he was worst as a Bolshevik. He was still trapped in a pre-Revolutionary bourgeois aesthetic, but this was eminently useful in cultivating and refining the post-Revolutionary one.

Such sophisticated sensibility -- which, had it been successful, might have done something worthwhile with socialist realism -- carried to the tenements of the East Bronx, and later to the book-lined railroad apartments of the Upper West Side, where, as Bellow once satirized Eliot (in Yiddish, no less), "the women [came and went], talking of Marx."

So you might say that Eliot's anti-Semitism was ironic and paradoxical; he had the profoundest impact on the very Jews that had him twitching in his tweeds.