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Looking back years later on the absence of any real response to this catastrophe on his part and that of others, Irving Howe commented, Some of us continued to think more or less in Marxist categories—loosened and liberalized, but Marxist still... [And] Marxism, by remaining fixed upon class analysis and social categories appropriate only to the bourgeois-democratic epoch, kept us from seeing the radically novel particulars of the Nazi regime... 11 The failures here not only of perception but of historical and political judgment are hardly unique to Howe and Fiedler but are repeated in the work of most of the New York Jewish intellectuals.

Disparagement is that much lighter species of dismissal that is sometimes designated as “social antisemitism,” and is essentially a type of snobbery. Snobbery falls well short of lethal hatred—but it conveys more than a touch of insolence, and insolence in a political context can begin to be worrisome; it is, one might say, not helpful. ” A skilled sophist (one might dare to say solipsist), she tosses those who meticulously chart and expose antisemitism’s disguises into the same bin as the antisemites themselves.

Was the cry of the Crusaders as they swept through Europe, annihilating one Jewish community after another; it stood for Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is destroyed), and was taken up again by anti-Jewish rioters in Germany in 1819. , canard and vilification—to its consequences: violence and murder. The Jews, she wrote, have been “regarded and treated very much as beasts hunted for their skins,” and the curse on them, the charge of deicide, was counted a justification for hindering them from pursuing agriculture and handicrafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiar dress; for torturing them, spitting at them and pelting them; for taking it as certain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned the wells, and took pains to spread the plague; for putting it to them whether they would be baptized or burned, and not failing to burn and massacre them when they were obstinate; but also for suspecting them of disliking their baptism when they had got it, and then burning them in punishment of their insincerity; finally, for hounding them by tens on tens of thousands from their homes where they had found shelter for centuries, and inflicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new dispersion.