Ingram. And Antisemitism again
Andrew Sullivan gives us another peek under Ingram's rock. Evidently he's been at it for awhile. And is quite unabashed.
The investigation of antisemitism in Europe is one that intrigues me in much the same way that I am wrestling with the history and present of racism in the US. Quite some years ago I was a counselour at summer camp [a zionist teen camp in New York] and we were observing Yom HaShoa [Holocaust Remembrance Day] and watching excerpts from the documentary Shoa. I remember vividly the interview with Polish citizens who had lived in towns near the death camps. I remember being deeply chilled by how matter of fact they were about the horrific chapter in history they had witnessed. And for the first time I truly understood at a visceral level that the history of European anti-semitism was just as ugly and violent as racism in the US.
Maybe I should explain. Despite the fact that I am Jewish, my experience of antisemitism in the US has been rather benign and easy to dismiss as the ignorant knee-jerk rants of poor white kids who I knew were getting smacked around by angry frustrated fathers at home. I had a much keener appreciation of the virulence of racism. Maybe it was watching Gone with the Wind, or seeing an old black and white photograph of a lynching, or old racist caricatures of slaves, or just studying US history at school -- but I got it. I got how ugly and evil and creepy and violent racism is -- as it was acted and spoken and felt in the US. I mean, the evil of it -- when you really let yourself understand what "ordinary" white folk perpetrated against black americans -- the evil of it chills me deeply and primally like a story of ancient horror by Lovecraft.
In any case, it was in my early twenties -- watching Shoa -- that I first understood that Jews were the target of hate that deep and old and evil as well. So now I find myself a bit of an anomaly politically. Firmly on the left in terms of US policies, and firmly on the left in terms of Israeli policy, but I also consider myself a Zionist. I am in favor of a Palestinian state, yes. But I am also acutely sensitive to the reality that many "friends" of the Palestinians use [unconsciously or not] legitimate criticism of Israeli policy as a convenient pressure valve for an enmity they have been carrying deep in their bones for centuries.
So Ingram's antisemitism doesn't surprise me. Only his candor does.
7:41:05 PM 
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