Those Who Forget the Past by Ron Rosenbaum Page A

the more cynical have said, on the side of the Jews as long as they were victims). Many Jews, including to some extent myself, saw democratic socialism as embodying some of the ethical spirit of Judaism’s prophets and sages.
    But there is another side to the Left’s relationship to Judaism. Something that became apparent in that year 2002 when some icons of the Left, such as Naomi Klein and Todd Gitlin, felt compelled to speak out about it, sought to separate the Left from “the socialism of fools,” as anti-Semitism has been called. 16
    There were those who argued that in some ways anti-Semitism found a
natural home
on the Left. At the heart of that argument was the notion of Reason. The Left’s Enlightenment faith in human perfectibility had replaced God with an almost religious faith in Reason. And (as the writer David Samuels suggested to me) for the first Enlightenment philosophers, such as the notoriously anti-Semitic Voltaire, religion represented unReason, and Jewishness was the fount of all religion and thus of all un-Reason.
    Paul Berman put the Left’s devotion to Reason at the heart of his analysis of the double standard the Left applied to the “suicide bombings” in Israel. Deploring them, of course (with some exceptions), but always with a “but”:
but
they are understandable in some way. They
must
be. And to understand all is to forgive all, we’re told by Enlightenment
philosophes
.
    What Berman argued was that, confronted with a “suicide bomber” blowing himself and dozens of men, women, and children to bits, the Left in effect could not look directly at the act, because it’s so unbearable, because to take it all in might lead to admitting that some things can’t be contained or explained within the framework of Reason—especially murderous religious fanaticism. That not all problems are soluble. That some, history suggests, are ineluctably tragic. Left theories of history, from Whig Progressivism to Marxist dialectical materialism, tend to lack a tragic sense of life—and of history.
    And so one saw variations on “looking away” again— explaining it, distancing it, “contextualizing” it with “reasons.” This accomplished two goals: first, it removed the element of unreason from the “suicide bomber’s” act itself. Made it “understandable” in both senses of the word. And second, it allowed a shift of blame to the victims of the blast. Made them part of the oppressive hegemony that in some abstract—horribly abstract—way “deserved it.” Thus, there
was
Reason behind their death. Thus, there
was
a measure of justice to it. As there was to those who responded to the attacks of September 11 by saying, in one way or another, “Sorry about the three thousand dead, but America had it coming,” or, alternately, “America needed the lesson.”
    Another, deeper connection of the Left to anti-Semitism is to be found in Marxism itself. I’m not the first to point out that much Marxist imagery is a kind of universalized version of anti-Semitic imagery. The greedy capitalist is substituted for the greedy Jew, the suffering proletariat for the suffering Jesus scourged by Jews. The promised Marxist future dissolution of the state and universal peace, once the exploiter (read, Jewish) class is eliminated, is substituted for the promise of Heaven for the Elect.
    In fact I’d suggest there is a darker element in some of the Left’s willingness to demonize Israel. It has to do with a different kind of denial, not the neo-Nazi Holocaust denial but the denial of—and then the equanimity about—the
Marxist
holocausts of the twentieth century. The reaction—or lack of reaction—to the emerging evidence for mass murders in the millions in Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China, in somewhat lesser numbers (but greater percentage of the population)