From the New York Times, 1989:
When the astronauts landed on the moon, Mr. Gill writes, illustrating what he alleges to be Campbell’s private anti-Semitism, ”Joe made the repellent jest” that ”the moon would be a good place to put the Jews.” Mr. Gill says the remark was heard by a member of his family who was a student at Sarah Lawrence. ‘Biases Against Much of Mankind’
Others who knew Campbell have supported the allegation of bigotry. Carol Wallace Orr, another contributor to The New York Review exchange, said she worked closely with Campbell on his book ”Mythic Image.” Campbell harbored ”mean spirited and seemingly unexamined biases against much of mankind,” she said.
”In addition to anti-Semitism, I remember in particular his vexation over blacks being admitted to Sarah Lawrence,” she writes. In a recent telephone interview, she said she did not remember Mr. Campbell’s other comments, but she said she was ”shocked at the time that there was this side to his personality that didn’t appear in his writing.”
Roy Finch, a professor emeritus of philosophy who knew Campbell for 20 years at Sarah Lawrence, said Campbell was ”a cryptofascist” who ”could be reckless in expressing his views.” These remarks are in a letter he wrote to The New York Review.
In a telephone interview, Professor Finch tried to put Campbell into an intellectual context necessary, he said, to understand him. Campbell, he said, was an admirer of figures like Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler and Ezra Pound, all of whom contended that Western civilization was threatened with the rot of decadence. Western civilization, Campbell said, needed to be reinvigorated by what he might have called the heroic values he associated with the heritage of the ancients, pre-classical Greeks, the Hindus, the Druids or the Celts, all subjects of his mythological investigations. ‘Tended to Lump People’
Professor Finch said Campbell’s ire came out of his preoccupation with Western decadence and included many people both past and present -Christians, Communists, liberals, Jews, even such Greek philosophers as Plato and Aristotle whom Campbell charged with sapping the Greek spirit of preclassical heroic virtue.
”Joe tended to lump people together,” Professor Finch said. ”So, for example, if he’s criticizing Communists, he might be inclined to lump them together with Jews. He thought the left-wing, liberal, Jewish, Communist point of view was part of the degeneration that was going on in our society, and his comments were in that context.”
