Frederick Douglass
Reality Bites
Paul Berman tells some pretty good stories, but you have to wait for the punch line. No one will be astonished to learn that Breyten Breytenbach, the celebrated South African novelist and homme de gauche, last year published (in Le Monde) an open letter to Sharon, and began with the now-rote observation that when any criticism of Israeli policy is vilified as anti-Semitism, free speech is imperiled. You may be mildly surprised to learn that Breytenbach thinks the Israelis, a people with a notorious tin ear for the way they sound to foreigners, are nonetheless manipulating American public opinion with fantastic success. But read on in the Breytenbach letter, and you will be diverted to learn that the “used-car salesman doppelganger, Netanyahu, ploys this craft of crude propaganda more openly, as if he were a dirty finger tweaking the clitoris of a swooning American public opinion.” While this sort of language does evoke the bad old days, one can look on the bright side: Breytenbach’s trope arguably bolsters the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Even sixty years ago, few people implied that assimilationist Jewish fingers, however dirty they might be when probing and manipulating literal or metaphorical gentile women, were also prehensile. As for Zionists–uniquely blessed with the ability to tweak things with a single finger–well, who knew?