'I’ll tell You What You Are Guilty Of'

We wanted a narrator for videos promoting the engineering school. Applicants submitted recordings of themselves reading copy we had provided. To my ears they all sounded good and the final decision wasn’t mine to make anyway. But the colleague whose job it was to hire the appropriate narrator quickly chose the one he wanted and dismissed one of the others with these words: “Too Jewy.” Dead serious, as final as a guilty verdict, and neither the first nor last such remark out of this guy’s mouth.

Sooner or later, we all encounter moments when anger, courtesy, self-preservation, timidity and a desire to punish compete for dominance. I said nothing and rationalized my decision by telling myself this jerk will never learn. Me admonishing him would change nothing and surely would antagonize him. After four years my decision still rankles.

 

I’ve always assumed that anti-Semitism like other viral infections will always be with us. One doesn’t “cure” such behavior. Holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” is a waste of time. To think otherwise betrays a profound naïveté about human nature. Jew-hatred answers a need felt by many. Douglas Murray in the April 26 issue of The Spectator writes:

 

“I am afraid that it is the nature of anti-Semitism that it is ineradicable. It can be subdued, and it can be called out, but it cannot be ended ‘once and for all’. The reasons lie deeper than our age is able to consider.”

 

Such thinking will offend the “Kumbaya” crowd, who choose to believe that reason trumps hatred and human nature is as malleable as Play-Doh. Murray bolsters his argument with a reference to Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (trans. Joachim Neugroschel, 1981): “Tell me how you can eradicate a hatred that complex and deep,” he asks. Murray then alludes to a vastly greater novel, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (trans. Robert Chandler, 1985):

   

“[O]ne of the things that has always impressed me on a technical level about the book is that at the midpoint of the action, Grossman suddenly takes a step back. For three pages he meditates on the nature of anti-Semitism. What a thing to do in the middle of describing Stalingrad and much more.”

 

And yet it makes sense. The two grand totalitarian schemes of the twentieth century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, were grounded in anti-Semitism – the former, explicitly; the latter, implicitly and in practice. Murray refers to Part II, Chapter 31, positioned shortly after the midway point of Life and Fate. Grossman halts his plot and makes no mention of any of the dozens of characters he has created. In the previous chapter, an SS officer in a concentration camp refers to the “obscure, incomprehensible and terrifying  alogical world of Adolf Hitler himself,” followed a paragraph later by Grossman’s autonomous essay/chapter, which begins: “Anti-Semitism can take many forms—from a mocking, contemptuous ill-will to murderous pogroms.” Murray quotes this passage from the novel:

 

“Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and state systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.”

 

Grossman’s chapter is written as plainly and logically as a proposition in Spinoza’s Ethics. He doesn’t raise his voice. He describes three levels of Jew-hatred. The first is “relatively harmless everyday anti-Semitism. This merely bears witness to the existence of failures and envious fools.”

 

In other words, “Too Jewy.”