The Big Question

By JUDY LASH BALINT

Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism

Edited by Ron Rosenbaum

649 pages. Random House. $16.95.

Books about anti-Semitism seem to be appearing on bookstore shelves fast and furious. The latest in the genre is a compilation of articles edited by Columbia School of Journalism professor Ron Rosenbaum, under the title Those Who Forget the Past.

Rosenbaum, a columnist for the New York Observer, is best known for his 1999 bestseller, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. He spent 10 years researching that book, which explores what scholarship and analysis of Hitler reveals about contemporary society.

This new compendium on anti-Semitism features some 49 articles by 46 authors–some appear twice–divided into 11 chapters, with titles that start out with the promise of a slightly fresh approach (Awakenings; Something Old Something New; One Death, One Lie) but fade by the last few chapters into topics on which there is little new to say (Some New Forms of Anti-Semitism; Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism; Israel).

It's difficult to determine just who might be the potential reader of such a volume. Most committed Jews concerned about anti-Semitism will have already digested most of the offerings presented here, or will at least be very familiar with the arguments made in them. A glance at the permission credits reveals that almost all the articles included in Those Who Forget The Past have previously appeared in publications such as Commentary, Midstream, The National Interest, The New York Times, and The New Republic.

It's doubtful that anti-Semites will pick up a book with the name Rosenbaum and "Anti-Semitism" splashed across the title page, and the average non-Jewish reader, perhaps mildly curious about the resurgence of an age-old prejudice, will surely be put off by more than 500 pages of verbiage on the subject. Indeed, the cumulative effect of absorbing fifty articles on various manifestations of modern anti-Semitism will be daunting for all but the most voracious reader.

In his lengthy introduction, Rosenbaum tries to explain what led him to compile this body of work. Essentially, he writes, it was to look at the question of anti-Semitism ("a chilling phrase") and the questions raised within it, as well as to "document both the phenomenon of contemporary anti-Semitism and the responses to it." But the questions addressed by the contributors to his volume are virtually no different than those raised by authors of other works on the subject published recently.

Abe Foxman in Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, Jerome Chanes in Antisemitism in America Today, and Dan Cohn Sherbok in Anti-Semitism: A History and Gabriel Schoenfeld in The Return of Anti-Semitism all document and analyze similar issues. Rosenbaum himself mentions these other books and even acknowledges, "Readers are entitled to ask why is this book different from all those other books." His answer is that he includes a multiplicity of perspectives, "some of them clashing." But the clashes are in fact few and far between, and again, are battles that have already been well played out in the public arena. The inclusion of the Peter Boyer/Frank Rich battle of words over Mel Gibson's movie must surely elicit a stifled yawn from all but the most avid Passion devotees.

Several of the essays scattered throughout the collection do certainly bear re-reading. The contributions of Ruth Wisse, Fiamma Nirenstein, and Barbara Amiel bring to this book personal perspectives full of passion, anecdotes that illuminate and conclusions that are thought provoking. Marie Brenner's piece from Vanity Fair on France's Scarlet Letter is an engrossing account of some of the larger-than-life figures on the French Jewish scene and their battles with the French Jewish establishment as they each try to combat escalating acts of Jew hatred.

But towering above them all, and reason enough to pick up this book, is the afterword by acclaimed novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick. In a piece entitled "The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!" Ozick describes the 50-year respite from anti-Semitism that followed the Holocaust and delves back into history to describe little-known sources and manifestations of anti-Jewish feeling.

Ozick ably dissects "The Big Lie" that the Jews of Israel are "oppressors" who "ruthlessly pursue, and perpetuate 'occupation' solely for the sake of domination and humiliation." She combats the "liberal zealotry" that has led to "a willed inability to distinguish one thing from another," in moral terms, and she goes after academic Judith Butler, the author of one of the essays in the Rosenbaum collection, for being "sunk in self-deception." Writes Ozick: "Her misunderstanding of anti-Semitism is profound."

As an afterword, it's Ozick's conclusion that forms the depressing last sentence of this book that's dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pearl. After writing that the title of her contribution comes from an 1878 essay by George Eliot, who explains that Hep! stood for Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is destroyed) and was the cry of the Crusaders as they rampaged through Jewish communities, Ozick concludes: "And steadily, whether from the street or the salon, one hears the enduring old cry: Hep! Hep! Hep!"