Although no Jews have been burned alive — the norm in pandemics historically — the virus of anti-Semitism is far from on lockdown. From the police officer who reportedly called for a bomb to be dropped on an Orthodox community in Orange County, N.Y., to the viral caricature of a former Jewish health minister pouring poison into a well in France, to anti-Zionists ramping up the lies about Israel, COVID-19 has unleashed a torrent of anti-Jewish hate.
In the midst of all this, Ruth Wisse, a distinguished senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and author of the 1992 classic “If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews,” gave a provocative digital lecture titled “Can Liberals Confront Anti-Semitism?” When I first saw the title, I thought that she meant (illiberal) leftists. But Wisse does mean liberals. In fact, she offered a cogent explanation of liberalism’s descent into leftism.
Wisse began by explaining her use of the word liberalism: “A belief in rationality; individual freedom within a constitutional, participatory democracy; cultural pluralism in an open society; and obedience to the rule of law. Underlying all of these liberal positions is a hopefulness about human nature.”
Modern liberalism, she said, “Assumed what may be its most balanced form in American liberal democracy.” Liberty is also not coincidentally at the core of the Jewish nation and Zionism, “the self-liberation of the Jews from exile.” Freedom “binds Jewish and American values.”
So, she said, “How can something as positive as liberalism be threatening its own foundations?”
“There is bitter irony in the fact that Jews, who perfected the arts of accommodation in their dispersion, must now perfect the arts of war as the cost of maintaining their homeland.” — Ruth Wisse
Wisse traces the problem back to the founding of modern Israel. Because of Arab rejectionism, “Israel’s sovereignty was kept contingent.” Yes, things may be changing, Wisse said, but the ongoing resistance still requires a heavy military burden.
“There is bitter irony in the fact that Jews, who perfected the arts of accommodation in their dispersion, must now perfect the arts of war as the cost of maintaining their homeland,” Wisse said. We should be proud of this transformation, “but it knocks down one of the pillars of liberal faith.”
As a result, Wisse said, “The better Israel gets at self-protection, the more liberals damn it as a militaristic threat. This does not discredit the Jews — it exposes the perversion of liberalism.” The Arab refusal “to live together in peace” also defied the mission of the United Nations: “the global quintessence of liberalism.”
Meanwhile, everything about Zionism that depended on the Jews themselves succeeded. “I believe that the reclamation of the Land of Israel equals or exceeds any miracle recounted in the Bible,” Wisse declared. “Anti-Zionism cannot disprove the success of Zionism; it does discredit the organization founded on liberal principles that no one dared to enforce.”
If liberals expect all conflicts to be resolved and trust that international organizations can mediate between adversaries, and if the war against Israel proves the opposite, then one of the two must be wrong. “One either fights evil to stop the anti-liberal war against the Jews or betrays the Jews by insisting on the liberal paradigm,” Wisse said.
This cognitive dissonance was resolved by persuading liberals that Israelis, not Arabs, stand in the way of peace: Israel began to be blamed for the aggression against it.
“Good people are not easily seduced by the anti-Jewish right, but they have always been susceptible to the anti-Jewish left that speaks in the name of a higher morality. One sees liberals not just caving in the face of anti-Jewish aggression but degenerating into socialist and leftist illiberalism. Is that what inevitably happens? I don’t know. But it is certainly happening in America right now. In the mind of a socialist, there is nothing more reactionary than this self-regulating people with its historical roots in divinely ordained religion,” Wisse said.
“Essentially,” she continued, “liberal assumptions about human nature and progress have underestimated the power of evil. There is ‘healthy liberalism’ (America at its best) and ‘illiberal liberalism/leftism’ (Western democracy at its worst), and anti-Zionism is the virus that turns one into the other.
“We Jews have a double stake in making America aware of its responsibilities to itself. The greater a civilization, the greater its responsibility to defeat its challengers — in the world of ideas, on the battlefield, and in the international arena. Israel fights the war on the ground; we have to fight it in domestic politics.”
Karen Lehrman Bloch is an author and cultural critic.
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