RITA KRAMER: THE DEVIL THAT NEVER DIES
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/rita-kramer-the-devil-that-never-dies.html
The controversy aroused by Daniel Goldhagen’s new book The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism, has to do with the extent, not the existence, of Jew hatred–most generally expressed as opposition to Israeli policies–in today’s world. Goldhagen maintains that the global spread of technology has led to an explosion of anti-Semitism in recent years to levels not seen since the years leading up to the Holocaust. In a review of Goldhagen’s book in The Wall Street Journal on September 12, 2013, Anthony Julius takes issue with Goldhagen’s argument.
Julius, a distinguished literary and legal figure and the author of Trials of the Diaspora, a definitive history of anti-Semitism in England, criticizes Goldhagen’s book as a deplorable work, its research unreliable and its conclusions unbalanced.
While author and critic disagree on the extent and intensity of anti-Semitism today, neither of them denies its widespread existence. The disagreement seems to center on questions of scholarship and the nature and uses of data. Which leaves the unarguable fact that anti-Semitism is not dead or even dying and that once again Jews in Europe and indeed in countries throughout the world are being made to feel unwelcome.
A look at the bitter past, when it was critical that Jews be admitted to places of refuge, with persecution enforced in Germany and horrors already on the horizon, is a lesson on why Israel matters, a reminder of how the existence of the Jewish State has changed the Jewish fate. Now there is a door open when once doors everywhere were shut in the faces of the helpless threatened. In the decade leading up to World War II Europe’s pervasive anti-Semitism was fastened on by Hitler but had not yet reached the final solution–plans for technological extermination. At the time Germany would seem to have been ready to settle for ridding itself of its Jews. And so the possibility of “resettlement” was proposed to an indifferent world. And how better to postpone action and pass the humanitarian buck than by organizing a conference?
So it was that at the initiative of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, representatives of thirty-two countries, a score of private organizations, and some 200 journalists met in 1938 in the picturesque French resort town of Evian-les-Bains to consider the question of who would make room for the desperate Jewish refugees from the mass arrests and deportations being carried out in Germany and newly annexed Austria. The answer, after eight days of discussion, was no one. No one, that is, except the small Dominican Republic. The United States had an unfulfilled quota for immigrants and there was plenty of room in British mandated Palestine, but neither of the leading exemplars of Western civilized humanistic values could see the way to rescuing the doomed Jews. Anti-Semitism was alive and well among the American population at the time and the State Department held to a nativistic policy carried out by officials like Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long with outspoken views about the undesirability of approving visa applications from Europe’s Jews.
The Evian Conference resulted in much oratory, much hypocritical handwringing, and many expressions of moral indignation, as well as the formation of another committee–the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. Little was heard of the ICR afterward and little was done to stop the progress of Hitler’s war against the Jews. Chaim Weizmann summed up the situation–there were countries where Jews were not allowed to live and others which they were not allowed to enter. And soon after the delegates had gathered up their papers and gone home the door closed on Europe’s Jews forever.
Another exercise in the politics of empty gestures was a conference which took place in Bermuda in April of 1943, just as the Nazis were wiping out the last of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. Called by the British as a response to increasing public reaction to reports of what was happening to the Jews of Europe, this gathering too saw no result beyond statements by the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office about the impossibility of taking any meaningful action. Proposals for enlisting the aid of neutral countries or of sending food to the starving victims were dismissed out of hand.
Both governments, it later became clear, were apprehensive about the results of the possible release of large numbers of Jewish refugees, even if rescue were possible. The Roosevelt administration was concerned about the effect of being seen as too pro-Jewish in the coming election campaign and the British would not allow discussion of their Palestine immigration policy. The last gasp of the hitherto moribund ICR, the Bermuda conference was held in a remote setting and with little or no publicity. And the slaughter went on, in the face of what David S. Wyman would define as the abandonment of the Jews.
And now again the Jews, major contributors to the culture of a once-great continent, are afraid to appear in public in parts of Europe wearing articles of clothing or insignia that exhibit their faith. But while anti-Semitism persists in all its blind irrationality, there is one difference from the years that led up to the Shoah. It is Israel.
This time there is a haven. And whether or not Daniel Goldhagen is right about the present threat, Jews everywhere in the world should be aware of what it means for Jewish survival–for their survival–that there is a homeland, a place of rescue in time of need that no committee needs to approve.
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