'Being Vulnerable to History'

I read Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer when it was published in 1966. Readers often turn melodramatic when describing the impact a book has had on them – “life-changing,” that sort of thing. Such claims usually can be chalked up to enthusiasm untempered by critical rigor. The Fixer, that most Russian of American novels, changed me in the way fiction, more than historical writing, can drive and deepen human understanding.

I turned fourteen that year. Already I was interested in Jews and Judaism, Israel and Zionism, none of which seemed alien to me. Malamud’s retelling of the 1913 Menahem Mendel Beilis case – blood libel in Czarist Russia – confirmed my sense that long before Hitler, Jews were getting a raw deal. Yakov Bok, the novel’s protagonist, has been falsely jailed and will be tried for the ritual murder of a Christian boy. Malamud’s narrator writes:

“[H]e had stopped thinking of relevancy, truth, or even proof. There was no ‘reason,’ there was only their plot against a Jew, any Jew; he was the accidental choice for the sacrifice. He would be tried because the accusation had been made, there didn’t have to be another reason. Being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors. Accident and history had involved Yakov Bok as he had never dreamed he could be involved. The involvement was, in a way of speaking, impersonal, but the effect, his misery and suffering, were not. The suffering was personal, painful, and possibly endless.”

My friend Moshe Vardi, an Israeli-born computer scientist at Rice University, has written an essay, “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, Israelophobia, and the US Civil-Rights Act.” Moshe is as thoughtful and rational a man as I know. I’ve never heard him indulge in hysteria or threaten a soul. His argument is carefully reasoned and evidence-based, not Twitter-style blathering. “This year would have been my 30th commencement event at Rice University,” he writes, “and I have decided to skip it. The campus was not safe enough for me to do so.” I suggest you read the entire essay. Moshe concludes:

“So Israeli students and employees are harassed and threatened on the campus of Rice University. Furthermore, these threats occur in a campus environment that can be fairly described as lawless. Under Title VI, a hostile environment exists where there is conduct, including verbal, that is sufficiently severe, pervasive, or persistent so as to interfere with or limit the ability of an individual to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or privileges provided by a school. Under Title VII, a hostile work environment exists when the workplace is ‘permeated with … intimidation … that is sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment.’ Israelis at Rice have to arm themselves in order to feel safer on campus. Is this not a hostile environment?”

On the final page of The Fixer, Malamud writes of Bok: “One thing I’ve learned, he thought, there’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. You can't be one without the other, that's clear enough. You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed.”

Who would have guessed that American university students and others in 2024 would endorse Nazi thinking and behavior, and celebrate genocide? Shades of 1933.