Here's a very fine essay (via 64.247.33.250) by the redoubtable Paul Berman, on the strange "new wind" of anti-Jewish sentiment. As Berman demonstrates (by parsing out four examples of contemporary discourse) the most disturbing thing about the "new mood" is not the outright, easily-identified anti-Semitism (though that certainly does occur); rather, it is a more general mood, a tendency, a manner of speaking, that it is extremely difficult to pin down, even by those who, often unwittingly, indulge in it. It pops up "in a fashion that seems almost unconscious, even among people who would never dream of expressing an extreme or bigoted view, but who end up doing so anyway."
His comments on historian Tony Judt's essay "Israel: the Road to Nowhere" are particularly apt as a general observation of how legitimate "criticism of Israel" can veer towards something like anti-Semitism even in the most respectable contexts. Rational, critical observations elide into an implied condemnation not of this or that policy or event, but rather of the Jewish religion and of the Jewish people as a whole. Well-meaning, even-tempered people in "hate free zones" deliver their well-meaning, even-tempered "hate-free" discourse in terms that hint at the ethos, and even echo the rhetoric, of "classic" anti-Semitism without realizing just how bad it sounds to anyone who is really listening; and they react with intense, affronted fury when anyone notices. Anti-Jewish discourse of this type sends two simultaneous messages: overtly unobjectionable "criticism" couched in terms which imply something much darker and more sinister. Here's one of Berman's perceptive observations:
[Judt's] essay, all in all, seems to have been written on two levels. There is an ostensible level that criticizes Israel, although in a friendly fashion, with the criticisms meant to rescue Israel from its own errors and thereby to help everyone else who has been trapped in the conflict; and a second level, consisting of images and random phrases (the level that might attract Freud's attention), which keep hinting that maybe Israel has no right to exist.Yet it is the unintended inferences that seem to me the most frightening of all. To go out and fight against bigots and racists of all sorts, the anti-Semites and the anti-Arab racists alike, seems to me relatively simple to do, even in these terrible times. It is not so easy to put up a fight against a wind, a tone against an indefinable spirit of hatred that has begun to appear even in the statements of otherwise sensible people.