It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.
~Tony Kushner, Angels In America: Millenium Approaches
We are at a moment where in this world, this nation, this political movement, and this community, the issue of anti-Semitism is more than perhaps ever before front and center. A former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, has published a book on Israel which has inflamed the passions of those on all sides of this issue. Actual anti-Semitic attacks on Jews are again on the rise in Europe and both Iran and Egypt have held conferences in the last year to "study" the veracity of the Nazi Holocaust. In the United States, one woman was killed and five more wounded in an anti-Semitic shooting. Notable public figures such as Mel Gibson and Judith Regan of Harper Collins Publishing have had highly public incidents of anti-Semitic comments. Classic anti-Semitic texts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been enjoying a worldwide resurgence, in places as disparate as Japan, Australia, and Ohio. Meanwhile, politicized charges of anti-Semitism in the United States have now begun to include even liberal Jews among the accused.
Even for a person like myself, who is well versed in Jewish history, the situation is a puzzle. How indeed are we to deal with these diverse problems, and diverse claims and concerns pressing upon us? Indeed, how do we balance the very real and urgent issue of violent anti-Semitism with the issue of those who wish to use anti-Semitism as a tool to suppress dialogue and dissent?
The answer is, of course, we cannot, at least not perfectly. A person may make a reasonable comment based in prejudice alone, and we may perceive prejudice in those who use like expressions in innocence of their similarity to the expressed sentiments of those whom we know to be steeped in hatred alone. There is no magic formula which informs us of the difference.
But there is also an easy and obvious observation that we can make. There is a movement in America that we know of absolutely, a movement which wishes that we silence ourselves, that we will not dare to speak our views or our hearts. They prey upon our fears and on our societal desire to conform. They tell us that if we speak freely, we may embolden our enemies. We may undercut the morale of our servicemen and women. We may indeed be betraying our nation itself.
This is undeniably false. And nothing helps illustrate this better than that the same voices, the "usual suspects" as they could easily be called, are now out to suppress any alternative to their party line on the subject of Israel.
Yet, Israel indeed thrives on dissenting views. The current Knesset (the equivalent of the American Congress in Israel) has elected representatives of twelve political parties, representing platforms as diverse as the Balad Party, an Arab Nationalist party, and Yisrael Beytenu, an extreme Jewish party which endorses the forcible transfer of all Arabs from land controlled by Israel. And as Israel not only tolerates but indeed grows its strength from such variety of opinion and argument, they do so under a greater threat from terrorism and hostile states than the United States and the wars it is waging could dream to present to us.
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
The source of that famous quote is Justice Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and one of the great leaders of the American Zionist Movement. It goes a long way to demonstrate the negative reasoning of those who wish to suppress voices, Jew or Gentile, who would speak critically of Israel or of Zionism. Indeed, no better demonstration of the bankruptcy of those ideals can be found than the criticism of his namesake Brandeis University choosing to award the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner an honorary doctorate last year.
The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.
~Justice Louis Brandeis
It is difficult indeed to imagine that Justice Brandeis would not wish to honor Mr. Kushner. In this, I am but a highly biased person; I have had the singular pleasure of working with Mr. Kushner in my career. It is a pleasure that I can only describe as truly singular, for although I have had the honor of working for Oscar winners and Nobel Laureates, I have never had another person whose genius and passion was so powerfully affecting to me, or that impacted my life through nothing but his words in every aspect from the personal to the political. Mr. Kushner indeed wrote the most moving and life-altering political essay that I have ever read, and against his brilliance I have weighed that of Twain and de Touqueville.
Indeed, Mr. Kushner and I differ greatly on the matter of Israel. On the subject of Israel, Mr. Kushner has said "We really have to define what we mean by Zionism. Zionism aimed at the establishment of a national identity is predicated on a reading of Jewish history and an interpretation of the meaning of Jewish history that I don't share. Insofar as Zionism is an idea that the solution to the suffering of the Jewish people was the establishment of a Jewish nation, I think it is not the right answer. I don't think that a minority group has a lot of hope in surviving entirely on the basis of its own force and power, because by definition a minority is outnumbered substantially. Minorities lead terrible lives of suffering and oppression, and the solution to the suffering of a minority group is constitutional democracy, which gives rights to minorities and protects them against majoritarian tyranny." Those are not my views, but what reasonable person could see them as ones that were anti-Semitic? That would or could do harm, except in the minds of those already twisted towards hatred?
The answer is simple: they could not. These people are not concerned about anti-Semitism; they care not for the threats that Jews face, in Israel or anyplace else in the world. They care for nothing more than the short-term goal of silencing their critics. They are nothing more than the Ann Coulters and Bill O’Reillys of the sphere of Judaism.
Jews in this world face a real threat. We ought not allow those who wish to blind us with the fear of anti-Semitism to conceal that from us. And I am convinced that no greater risk to Jews in this world exists than that posed by those who would cry wolf in the name of prejudice to serve their own political schemes.
Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.
~Tony Kushner, Angels In America: Perestroika