Sunday, March 15, 2009

Disgusted

That's what I am, that someone could write this today:

Jews of my generation grew up not only with a sense of the disaster that had so recently overtaken the Jewish people, but also in a climate of opinion in which anti-Semitism had been more or less marginalized, driven into the sewers of the political far-right and into coded and 'genteel' forms elsewhere. It was possible to believe that its National-Socialist manifestation had discredited anti-Semitism beyond recovery. No more. That turns out to have been an illusion. Anti-Semitism is back - not that it ever went away completely, but I mean back out of the sewers and from the shamefacedness and the self-restraining codes - in all its ugly colours. It still bears the stink of what it essentially is.
Not disgusted with Norm. Disgusted with the circumstances that led to him having to say that.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I suspect that he may be wrong here: "anti-Semitism had been ...driven ..into coded and 'genteel' forms elsewhere". It's my guess that Drawing Room anti-semitism has little to do with exterminatory anti-semitism. At the least, I'd be interested to see someone argue the contrary with evidence rather than assertion. But as for the new anti-semitism - the Left's anti-semitism - it just illustrates the fact that it's rarely wrong to assume that Lefties are shits.