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Interview: Simon Schama and Alain Finkielkraut Discuss a Percieved Resurgence of Anti-Semitism in the US and Europe
All Things Considered: May 13, 2003
Conference Reviews State of Anti-Semitism
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Old Demons, New Debates--that is the title of a conference held in New York this week sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The conference has attracted an array of Jewish and some non-Jewish intellectuals from the United States and Europe. That phrase in the title `Old Demons' refers to expressions of anti-Semitism, which have alarmed many Jews in Europe and also here. Joining us from New York City are two participants in the conference: historian Simon Schama of Columbia University and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.
Welcome to both of you. Thank you for joining us today.
Professor SIMON SCHAMA (Columbia University): Hello.
Mr. ALAIN FINKIELKRAUT (Ecole Polytechnique): Hello.
SIEGEL: I'd like first to ask each of you to what degree you sense a resurgence of anti-Semitism, either in Europe or in the United States. Simon Schama?
Prof. SCHAMA: Well, I think there's no doubt about it. I mean, you can do the numbers insofar as that's necessary. The British press recently reported a 75 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, which is thought to be, in a good old-fashioned way, resistant to the more toxic aspects of this kind of bigotry. But just last week there was a cemetery desecration. I have to say my great-aunt and my great-uncle were among the desecrated. And there are also newer and uglier forms, not just old-fashioned--the application of swastika graffiti on the extreme right. What may be a bit more worrying is in the current climate of bitter anti-Americanism, notwithstanding Tony Blair, people more in the mainstream of political and intellectual life feel that there is no longer any taboo on crossing a line between anti-Zionism, criticizing the Israeli government, and anti-Semitism.
SIEGEL: Alain Finkielkraut, in France and elsewhere in Europe, do you definitely see a resurgence?
Mr. FINKIELKRAUT: In France, of course. It's not confined to France, but I would not call that phenomenon a resurgence of old-fashioned bigotry. Now we have to deal with new demons, and we have to be careful not to lug them into all debates, because the new anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism of today, speaks the idiom of anti-racism. The Jews are not accused of being a dangerous race. They are accused of being racist, especially because of what they are supposed to do or to approve in Israel, and that's a very difficult task for us because we know how to deal with incitement to racial hatred, but how to deal with incitement to anti-racist hatred, and that's what's happening every day in words and deeds.
SIEGEL: But do you think that--this is a highly hypothetical to the point of being extremely unprobable--if, say, the Jews of France were to follow the lead of those anti-Zionist Jews, a few very public people who've been highly critical of Israel, if the entire community were to go that way, would that be the end of contemporary French anti-Semitism?
Mr. FINKIELKRAUT: Yes, maybe, but, you know, it's not possible.
SIEGEL: It's not possible.
Mr. FINKIELKRAUT: Why isn't that possible? Because they don't want us only to criticize Sharon. They want us to compare Sharon to Hitler, and they want us, you know, to ask for the dismantlement not only of the settlements, but of Israel.
Prof. SCHAMA: Yes.
Mr. FINKIELKRAUT: And that, of course, can't happen. So it's really unlikely.
Prof. SCHAMA: The...
SIEGEL: Simon Schama.
Prof. SCHAMA: Yeah. The line that's being crossed, Robert, is actually from an attack on what Israel does to an attack on what Israel is.
Mr. FINKIELKRAUT: Exactly.
Prof. SCHAMA: And, of course, you know, if Jews would do the world a favor by disappearing entirely...
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Prof. SCHAMA: ...then I expect there wouldn't be any anti-Semitism, although as one of my colleagues at the conference reminded me, it didn't stop there being Japanese anti-Semitism. You can actually have anti-Semitism without Jews.
Prof. FINKIELKRAUT: Without Jews, yes.
Prof. SCHAMA: Spain is another example over many hundreds of years.
SIEGEL: Well, I'm curious, and I'd like to hear from Alain Finkielkraut, what your view is.
Prof. FINKIELKRAUT: Yes.
SIEGEL: Your father--who was, I gather, a Polish Jewish immigrant to France...
Prof. FINKIELKRAUT: Uh-huh.
SIEGEL: ...who was in the camps during the Second World War and survived them--certainly experienced the worst of European anti-Semitism in the last century. Do you have any forboding of anything remotely like what befell the Jews of the 20th century in Germany and in France and in Eastern Europe, for that matter?
Prof. FINKIELKRAUT: Well, during the last 50 years, the Jews in Europe have been shielded from hatred and bigotry by the shadow of Hitler, and it's not true anymore. But you have to be careful to understand, really, what's going on. Anti-Semitism in France today, and that's for the first time, goes along with a strong feeling of Francophobia among the Muslim population, but also among the progressive left, you know, with its very pride of its feeling of guilt. We are guilty for our colonial deeds, and we accuse Israeli of committing the same kind of deeds against the Palestinians without any feeling of guilt. That's why we have to denounce them. That's the way the left thinks. So the encounter between Muslim plain, innocent hatred and the progressive left's feeling of guilt is what's happening now, and it has nothing to do with what my father had to endure.
SIEGEL: I wonder if part of the problem here isn't that just as people debase and trivialize the Holocaust by comparing absolutely everything wrong that's done in the world to Nazism and Hitler, that indeed the Holocaust sets the bar so high for what people recognize as anti-Semitism that it seems to be almost whining to complain about things less than deportations and being rounded up at night.
Prof. FINKIELKRAUT: Right.
Prof. SCHAMA: Hey, Robert, it's the Jewish thing to kvetch, isn't it? You know, you're absolutely right. But you know, you don't have to have a whiff of Zyklon B to think there's anti-Semitism in the air. It depends on how you feel about different kinds of abuse. My own feeling is that what we think of as the rhetorical forms of abuse--shouted insults and affronts--are just a slip away from physical attacks. In France, we know that, you know, if you wear a yarmulke walking down a street, you're very likely to be abused in all kinds of ways. Children are regularly physically being beaten up in playgrounds. And the way that can--as is the case in some of the Muslim cities in Britain, too. The way that can happen is to go from taunts of `dirty Jew' to a kind of much more radical dehumanization.
So I know it's in--we're very often, those of us who are concerned about this, accused of being fretful and `oversensitive'--that's always a phrase used about Jews--Isn't it?--you know, feeling there's an anti-Semitic remark around every corner. But in this case, you know, if it sounds like anti-Semitism, it tastes like anti-Semitism, it smells like anti-Semitism, right now it sure as hell is anti-Semitism.
SIEGEL: Simon Schama and Alain Finkielkraut, thank you both very much for talking with us today.
Prof. SCHAMA: Thank you.
Prof. FINKIELKRAUT: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Simon Schama, historian of Columbia University, and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, were in New York attending the conference of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The conference was called Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West.
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