by David Greenberg

I once heard Paul Berman, in toasting Michael Walzer, say (and I'm paraphrasing) that when tough questions arise, he asks, "What would Michael Walzer think?" In other words, he looks to Walzer as a moral guide, a man whose opinions he might regard as wiser than his own. I've thought the same about my fellow Open U contributor Alan Wolfe. When Alan offers an opinion, it has to be taken seriously, and it often causes me to revise my own. Off a link from Democracy Arsenal, I found this discussion on the Boston-based NPR show, "On Point." It's worth hearing, with Wolfe, Alvin Rosenfeld, and Shulamit Reinharz mixing it up provocatively. But neither there nor in his Open U post, did Alan persuade me that calling Israel's most strident critics anti-Semitic is censorship or censorious or even such a bad thing. Mind you, it should be done with care and precision, not recklessly or angrily or wildly. It should not apply to Richard Cohen! Moreover, though I can't believe one still has to add these obvious caveats, one does: I don't mean mere critics of Israeli policies, such as of the occupation of the West Bank or the building of the security fence or of the Lebanon incursion. Criticize away! If this were merely a matter of name-calling, I think Alan would be right. But I think that at least some those who employ the anti-Semitic epithet--and by the way, Alvin Rosenfeld did not--are seeking to shake the scales from the eyes of naifs who imagine that likening Israel to Nazi Germany or to apartheid South Africa, or singling out Israel as deserving of terms like "murderous" and "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity," might somehow be done in good faith and a spirit of honest intellectual exchange. Indeed, I rather wish that the same outrage that attaches to using the term anti-Semite would attach to using words like "Nazi," "apartheid," and "war crimes" in reference to the Jewish state. Such hate-filled language seems to me at least as censorious--at least as much designed to squelch rational debate and pander to base fears--as suggesting that an inveterate, vicious critic of Israel's very existence might perhaps have some underlying negative feelings toward Jews. For my part, I think there are a lot of anti-Semites alive and well in America, on the left and the right. Probably some in the center, too. Why wouldn't there be? I commend to readers the anthology Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism, edited by Ron Rosenbaum. It contains many intelligent, thoughtful pieces on all sides of this complex issue (including from TNR's Leon Wieseltier). Reading it shows that in our current debates about Israel and American policy the matter of anti-Semitism needs to be not swept aside but confronted without flinching--even though it should not (and here Alan is of course right) be wielded as a bludgeon. Have I persuaded you at all, Alan?