Walls of Semitism

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, January 14, 1998

On January 2, I went with my father to see a mediocre off-Broadway play, Never the Sinner, about a sensational child murder in Chicago in 1923.

The play was staged at the American Jewish Theater, on 23rd Street and 6th Avenue in New York City. The AJT, as its literature refers to it, is a small basement space (it seats no more than 100). My father and I bought our tickets at the box office window, walked into the theater, handed our tickets to an old Russian gentleman hard of hearing, and turned smack into The Anti-Semitic Hall of Fame. There were two velvetine walls, one covered with images and documentary of the Holocaust, and the other with photocopied articles about or by contemporary anti-Semites: Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, various representatives of the politically unacceptable militia right.

I have been Jewish all my life, and have grown up in a variety of distinctly Jewish contexts, but I have been disgusted throughout my nineteen years by the clubby backbenching of certain paranoid segments of the Jewish community.

The definition of the American Jewish community by its own historical persecution is a lousy but pervasive idea. It updates historical threats and institutionalizes imagined ones.

It divides Jews out from the rest of Americans. It discredits Jewish group thought by largely restricting it to pontifications on the nature and extent of anti-Jewish prejudice.

When President Freedman opened the Roth Center for Jewish Life at Dartmouth this fall he had a clear opportunity to change the precepts of Dartmouth's Jewish community.

But he didn't, reverting instead to the old charges of smoky Ivy League exclusion by drudging up records that document half-century-old anti-Semitism at Dartmouth, and thereby tapping into the old fears over persecution.

President Freedman's speech, to be fair, has gotten a bad rap. His documentation of historical anti-Semitism constituted a fairly minor portion of his remarks.

But the fact that he decided to raise the issue at all, together with the New York Times ' selective coverage of the speech, indicates how far many will go in search of anti-Semitism.

The debate over the propriety of the Christmas Tree on Dartmouth's green and the singing of religious (Christian) carols at Christmas time on College property has raised a great fuss from both sides — those hunting for anti-Semitism and those denying it.

I reject thoroughly the line of defense of the tree and carols that claims America to be a Christian country and Dartmouth a Christian College. America is a constitutional country. Dartmouth is an academic college.

But the argument that the tree and carols constitute a repressively exclusive institutional endorsement of Christianity is silly. Christmas trees and Christmas carols are thoroughly benign and largely a-religious symbols of our American tradition. They do not oppress, but celebrate. Dartmouth's Jews have the Roth Center. The Christians can keep the tree.

The opposition to the Christmas tree and the sentiment that tracked down documentation of Dartmouth's anti-Semitism stem from the same trite parochial Jewishness that claims the Holocaust Museum in Washington as the unifying space for American Jewry.

Jews in America were once discriminated against. They are not anymore. There is no viable possibility that another Holocaust could happen in America.

The wandering tribe, for millennia in search of a place where they could be included, has found a home in constitutional America. The threat now is not from Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries, but from American Jews' own pervasive sense of perpetual persecution.

We are erecting walls of Semitism, and we need to stop.

Walls of Semitism

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