What I Owe Anti-Semites

You will know them because they know more about the Jewish religion than you do. As soon as you meet one of those, and think, by God they’ve got a lot of quotations, by God they know everything about Jews—then that’s what they are. And what cheers me about all this, is that your true anti-Semite, like your true Holocaust denier, is doomed to a kind of Dante-esque hell of living among Jewish things, Jewish books, Jewish artifacts. You can see them in the library, they’ve got the Talmud up here, and they’re burrowing away to find more and more evidence against the Jews. Few Jews live a more perfect scholarly Jewish life.
- Howard Jacobson, Denying Israel's Deniers

I despise anti-Semitism. A cursory overview of the blog should make that clear. Yet I confess my encounter with anti-Semites on the Internet, more than any Hebrew school lesson or summer camp experience, has encouraged my exploration of Jewish identity. Kabbalah teaches there are sparks of the divine even in ugliness. There are sparks of truth, if distorted, even in the ravings of anti-Semites.

Most secular Jews think Judaism is not relevant. Anti-Semites think Judaism is supremely relevant. Anti-Semites are loyal carriers of the "Chosen People" meme, even if they think we were chosen by Satan instead of God. I recommend all Jews struggle with the deeper questions anti-Semites pose: what explains our outsized role in history? Why were (are?) so many of us drawn to social and political radicalism? What is our place, or do we have a place, in the West? Are we clannish insiders or utopian universalists, or both or neither?

Anti-Semites get some things right, but draw the wrong conclusions because they start from a false premise: Jews are uber/untermenschen. They forget the truth stated by Mark Twain: "The Jews are members of the human race - worse I can say of no man." We did not invent modernity and we do not control history. We respond to it, often feebly.

The Holocaust is the clearest example of Jewish institutional stupidity. What sort of Elders of Zion would allow one-third of our people, our best people to die? Those who died were our intellectuals, our mystics, our working class. North American Jewry is a pitiful shadow of authentic Ashkenaz. Anyone who implies the creation of the state of Israel "makes up" for the Holocaust blasphemes the dead and is a damn fool.

I hope anti-Semites read this blog, because I know some of them are intelligent people. How could I, a reader of Céline and Eliot, think otherwise? Many of them would make ideal converts to Judaism because, as Howard Jacobson says, "few Jews live a more perfect scholarly Jewish life." For defiling the memory of my ancestors, I curse anti-Semites. But for believing in the relevance and vitality of their descendants, I praise them.

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