Free Those Who Forget the Past by Ron Rosenbaum Page A

help forestall it. It’s too early to hope such a process might work, considering the crude and savage incitement of radical Islamist anti-Semitism. But the MEMRI report suggests that
memory
—not dismissing the phenomenon, not looking away out of some exaggerated panic over “panic”—might be at least a source of some hopeful change.
    So any optimism I can muster comes from those who do face the facts and fight the good fight: the translators at MEMRI; those dedicated souls at the Anti-Defamation League, at CAMERA, and at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others, who deal with the depressing day-to-day reality of antiSemitism; intrepid reporters such as Jeffrey Goldberg; weblist media critics like Tom Gross; brave local cops like the one in the Paris
banlieue
s that Marie Brenner chronicles; “bloggers” like Meryl Yourish, Jeff Jarvis, and Roger Simon, to name a few; the “Exposing the Exposer” website guys Zachary and Mo; non-Jews such as Oriana Fallaci and Harold Evans who speak out because they understand that anti-Semitism
is
a problem of and for non-Jews as well. All people who refuse to look away. All people who believe that facing the threat directly will make a difference. I hope they’re right.
    As Lawrence Summers put it: “I would like nothing more than to be wrong. It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy—a prediction that carries the seeds of its own falsification. But that depends on all of us.”
    No more posthumous victories for Hitler.
    January 5, 2004

PART ONE
AWAKENINGS

JONATHAN ROSEN
    The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism
    WHEN I WAS G ROWI NG UP, my father would go to bed with a transistor radio set to an all-news station. Even without a radio, my father was attuned to the menace of history. A Jew born in Vienna in 1924, he fled his homeland in 1938; his parents were killed in the Holocaust. I sometimes imagined my father was listening for some repetition of past evils so that he could rectify old responses, but he may just have been expecting more bad news. In any event, the grumbling static from the bedroom depressed me, and I vowed to replace it with music more cheerfully in tune with America. These days, however, I find myself on my father’s frequency. I have awakened to anti-Semitism.
    I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ killer, I do not feel that prejudicial hiring practices will keep me out of a job, and I am not afraid that the police will come and take away my family. I am, in fact, more grateful than ever that my father found refuge in this country. But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.
    I was born in 1963, a generation removed and an ocean away from the destruction of European Jewry. My mother was born here, so there was always half the family that breathed in the easy air of postwar America. You don’t have to read a lot of Freud to discover that the key to a healthy life is the ability to fend off reality to a certain extent. Deny reality too much, of course, and you’re crazy; too little and you’re merely miserable. My own private balancing act has involved acknowledging the fate of my murdered grandparents and trying to live a modern American life. I studied English literature in college and in graduate school, where I toyed with a dissertation on Milton, a Christian concerned with justifying the ways of God to man. I dropped out of graduate school to become a writer, but