Joseph Sobran was America’s finest columnist. His life and career were destroyed for questioning orthodoxies about Jews and Israel.
John Derbyshire told Joey Kurtzman in 2007:
Yes, indeed I was, and am, “afraid of offending Jews.” Of course I am! For a person like myself, a Gentile who is a very minor name in American opinion journalism, desirous of ascending to some slightly less minor status, ticking off Jews is a very, very bad career strategy. I approached the MacDonald review with great trepidation. I gave my honest opinion, of course—the entire point of my line of work is to speak your mind and get paid for it—but I’ll admit I was nervous. Reading the review again, I think it shows.
I have somewhere formulated Derbyshire’s Law, which asserts that: “ANYTHING WHATSOEVER said by a Gentile about Jews will be perceived as antisemitic by someone, somewhere.” I have experienced the truth of this many times. Further, I have the awful example of William Cash before me. Cash wrote an article titled “Kings of the Deal” for The Spectator back in 1994, pointing out, in a perfectly inoffensive way (and, of course, quite truly) that lots of Hollywood movers and shakers are Jewish. You can google the consequences.
Why is Derbyshire’s Law true? I am not sure. It seems to me that Jews have a very strong preference that their Jewishness not be noticed. They want to “pass” as much as possible…
If tomorrow I submitted a piece to National Review saying, “Kevin MacDonald is really onto something. He’s doing great work and I think everyone should read him,” the editors would reject the piece, and they would be right to do so. I don’t think I would be canned for submitting such an article, but if it happened, I would not be much surprised…
Anyone running a mainstream conservative magazine has to constantly demonstrate ideological purity in matters of race. They have to show repeatedly, by indirect means of course (I mean, it would be no use to just stamp “THIS IS NOT AN ANTISEMITIC MAGAZINE! WE DO NOT FAVOR THE RETURN OF JIM CROW LAWS!” in Day-Glo letters on the cover) that they are ideologically pure in this zone. Otherwise, they won’t be taken seriously by the cultural establishment…
So if National Review were to print unqualified praise (or even praise not severely qualified) of a guy who argues that Jews have a “group evolutionary strategy” that involves the transformation—I think in The Culture of Critique MacDonald actually says “destruction”—of Gentile society, they would have done what that nanny did: dumped several status points down the toilet.
A conservative magazine simply can’t afford to do that. Its hold on the attention of the U.S. public is too precarious. A conservative magazine can’t afford to let a writer say anything nice about MacDonald without putting it under some such title as “The Marx of the Antisemites.”
There isn’t any kind of chicanery or dishonesty there. That’s just how the world is, how America is, under what Bill Buckley calls “the prevailing structure of taboos,” and the prevailing system of status perception, both of individual human beings and of easily anthropomorphizable entities like opinion magazines…
Joe Sobran expressed it with his usual hyperbole: “You must only ever write of us as a passive, powerless, historically oppressed minority, struggling to maintain our ancient identity in a world where all the odds are against us, poor helpless us, poor persecuted and beleaguered us! Otherwise we will smash you to pieces.”
Though if you look up the William Cash affair I mentioned in my last post, Sobran’s quip is really not all that hyperbolic. When the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the CEO of United International Pictures, Barbra Streisand, assorted other media bigshots, and of course the ever-vigilant Mr. Leon Wieseltier, all denounce you in public, you are in pretty serious trouble…
So far as the consequences of ticking off Jews are concerned: First, I was making particular reference to respectable rightwing journalism, most especially in the U.S. I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT — not ever again — be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently.
Joseph Sobran wrote for National Review 8/5/83:
Few things have stunned me as much as a Jewish friend, whom I’d known for several years, saying, “I’ve always thought the Catholic Church was anti-Semitic.” A chasm opened.
It comes as a shock to be bitterly accused of hating Jews. It comes as a worse shock to be calmly accused of hating Jews. For many Jews it is an article of faith that all Gentiles – not just Christians – hate them. “Let’s face it,” a reader recently wrote to the New York Daily News, “there’s a little bit of Hitler inside every Gentile.”
After a while the Gentiles may begin to suspect that charges of anti-Semitism, like those of racism and sexism and homophobia, are manipulative devices to keep Gentiles twitching defensively. They do have that function sometimes, but the real motive, I suspect, is deeper: Such charges enable one to dismiss, in advance, all opposition.
Since Jews have preferred to blame all anti-Semitism specifically on Christianity. This is a frequent theme even in such sober Jewish publications as Commentary. It has the advantage of removing all intergroup friction from the level of experience to that of theology: Gentile hostility becomes pure prejudice, not conclusion. It also capitalizes on the Christian conscience. It has the disadvantage of failing to account for the common hostility of pagans and Moslems to Jews.
Here is a book by two very bright young Jews that attempts to cope with all the difficulties while retaining almost all the these at once. Why the Jews: The Reason for Anti-Semitism explains that Jews are hated for their Judaism. “The higher quality of Jewish life is objectively verifiable,” say Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin and it produces envy in Gentiles of all kinds. “To put it another way, the Jews’ belief in Jewish chosenness has provoked hostility because the quality of Jewish life has made Jews seem as if they really were chosen.”
The authors go on to say that “treatment of the Jews has served as one of humanity’s moral barometers. Watch how a nation, religion, or political movement treats Jews, and you have an early and deadly accurate picture of that group’s intentions toward others.” So anti-Semitism is akin to racism? No, it is “unique.” Judaism poses a “moral challenge.” But don’t people often hate Jews because they find many of them – leftists, pornographers, reductionist intellectuals – morally repellent? No, these are “non-Jewish Jews.”
Prager and Telushkin distinguish several kinds of anti-Semitism: ancient, Christian, Islamic, Enlightenment, leftist, Nazi, and anti-Zionist. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism? Yes. Then if someone simply doubts Israel’s claim to Palestine, he is an anti-Semite? Yes. Even if he doesn’t doubt the general virtues of the Jews? I guess so.
Here the thesis becomes highly suspicious. It sounds pretty self-serving to treat all adverse reaction as a single entity, for one thing. Two men dislike Brown for two different or even opposite reasons; it would be a mistake for Brown to posit a universal tendency called “anti-Brownism,” let alone to suspect “polite anti-Brownism” or “latent anti-Brownism” behind the smiling face of civility.
To Prager and Telushkin, all Gentiles past a certain point seem to look alike. Enlightenment anti-Semitism wanted to include Jews, not shut them out. It attacked their particularism for its own reasons; wrongly, perhaps, but still not out of a consistent value-system, and not because it resented what it saw as the “higher quality of Jewish life.”
In fact, most people in the West have tended to look on Jews as backward, not superior. The popular sociology that made “jew” and “gyp” slang terms for sharp dealing may have been crude and cruel, but it hardly expressed a sense that Jewish and Gypsy life were worthy of envy. Prager and Telushkin overlook the sheer ethnocentrism of other cultures, because they are possessed by an ethnocentrism of their own.
The very things that Jews take a just pride in have, by the same token, gone unappreciated and unnoticed by most other people. Every nation flatters itself that its own specialties are the central measure of excellence, and accordingly trivializes the excellences of its neighbors. Ironically, for a people so talented, many Jews now specialize in being hated, and willfully interpret anti-Semitism as an inverted acknowledgement of chosenness. Why the Jews? Assumes that Jewish self-absorption is matched by a Gentile absorption with Jews.
In fact it fairly demands such absorption. It implicitly shows how to use the charge of anti-Semitism as a club with which to extort support for Israel. To the extent that its mindset prevails – and it is very widespread nowadays – it becomes impossible to treat Jews as a normal part of the world, subject to the same standards as everyone else. This book insists that Jews are the standard, and that to criticize them by any other standard is to fall short of the only one that really counts.
But far from being anti-American, as this account might suggest, Prager and Telushkin are at pains to link Israel and America. “Almost as consistently as Jew-hatred, America-hatred has become a moral litmus test of nations, regimes, and individuals. America represents freedom, a higher quality of life, and a willingness to fight for its values.” Pardon me, but, patriotic though I like to think I am, America is something more complex and slightly less pure than these distilled virtues. And rightly or wrongly, many people do dislike us for what they sincerely see as our vices. Khomeini would mention our materialism, even he may have a point.
Others don’t meet us in the church or synagogue, where we are something like our ideal selves; they judge us by marketplace encounters, by what Prager and Telushkin would dismiss as “non-Jewish” traits, and usually don’t even know what we think we are, let alone see and appraise us as we see and appraise ourselves.
Finally, Why the Jews? Is an ingenious attempt to sustain a naïve self-image. In its conceptual framework, catch-all terms like “anti-Semitism” and even “Gentile” serve to make all non-Jews suspect. They can prove themselves non-anti-Semitic by paying a small price: simply sacrificing their own perceptions whenever these conflict with the Jewish self-image. I wonder if the authors realize what they are asking.
A couple of decades later, after he had been fired by National Review, Sobran wrote:
Sobran: My Obsession with Jews
By Joe Sobran
Now and then I get letters and e-mail messages asking why I am so “obsessed” with Jews and Israel. The question amuses me. It would be one thing if I often wrote about Mali, or Honduras, or Borneo, or any other nation or country most people remember only as a name from geography class.
I should think it’s obvious that I’m “responding” to an obsession – an obsession of contemporary culture, politics, the media, the arts. We have been getting 24/7 coverage of Jews, the Holocaust, and Israel for years now. The front pages, the evening news, the magazine covers devote so much attention to Israel – a country the size of New Jersey on the other side of the world – that you could get the impression that it spans several time zones and includes much of the world’s population (plus a few gentiles). Many columnists write about it more often than I do: Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, Cal Thomas, Paul Greenberg, Mona Charen, and George Will, to name a few. Of course they write uncritically about Israel, so they aren’t considered obsessed; Eric Alterman of THE NATION has compiled a list of more than 60 well-known pundits who “reflexively” support Israel, while finding only 6 who are frequently critical.
Every American president has to spend a disproportionate amount of his time coddling Israel and denouncing or actively fighting Israel’s enemies. It’s become part of the job description, as much as if it were written into the Constitution – or more so, since constitutional obligations have become optional and *this* obligation is definitely not. At the same time, no president or any other politician may suggest that the American-Israeli alliance imposes undue risks, costs, or burdens on the United States.
Journalism still devotes so much attention to the Holocaust that, as I once quipped, “The NEW YORK TIMES should be renamed ”HOLOCAUST UPDATE.” Books and movies about it continue to pour forth; bookstores have whole sections on the Holocaust, and universities consecrate entire departments to “Holocaust studies.” Holocaust memorials spring up everywhere. Elie Wiesel preaches that we *should* be obsessed with the Holocaust, as he is. Churches, accused of silent complicity in, and even ultimate responsibility for, the Holocaust, do their best to repent and atone.
Current Jewish sufferings are treated as specially tragic facts, extensions of the Holocaust itself. When Arab terrorists seized an Italian ship, the Achille Lauro, and threw a Jewish passenger overboard, a leading American composer, John Adams, wrote an entire opera, THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER, about the incident.
“Anti-Semitism” has become the chief of sins. It’s seldom helpfully defined, but it seems to take a thousand forms, from outright genocide to indiscreet bons mots about Israel. Many gentiles live in dread of being labeled anti-Semitic, a charge against which there is no real defense or appeal: to be accused is to be guilty. The burden of proof, as I’ve often pointed out, is on the defendant – and a difficult burden it is, since he hardly knows what he’s being accused of. How can you prove your innocence of an undefined crime? By the same token, there is no penalty for false charges of anti-Semitism, since a meaningless charge can’t be proved false anyway.
No gentile is quite safe from the charge. The Gospels, Catholicism, and the papacy have been indicted; so have Chaucer, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Edmund Burke, Dickens, Henry James, Henry Adams, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hemingway. (So far Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson seem to have escaped the accusation.) Then there are whole anti-Semitic nations, among them Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Germany, France, and Spain, lately joined by most of the Arab nations (thereby proving it is possible to be Semitic and anti-Semitic at the same time).
Billy Graham was recently roasted for anti-Semitism when it transpired that he’d made a few disparaging comments about Jews in the media during what he’d thought were private conversations with President Richard Nixon “30 years ago!” Perish the thought that there might have been a grain of truth in what he’d said; Graham dutifully groveled, then, when Jewish groups indignantly complained that this was not enough, he groveled again. A few years back, even that Hollywood icon Marlon Brando had to do a tearfully groveling retraction of some mildly critical comments about Jews in Hollywood.
And they wonder why I’m obsessed.
Of course I have my own special reasons. In 1986 I had my own run-in with fanatical Zionists, earned the dreaded label, and refused to perform the mandatory grovel. I won’t retell the whole story here, except to say that my own ardent support for Israel had ended in 1982 when I realized what Israel’s cruel invasion of Lebanon, led by Ariel Sharon, meant for America and for my family.
For America it meant that the Jewish lobby, including some of my neo-conservative friends (as I thought them), had gotten this country into a sticky situation: an alliance that was morally dubious and very dangerous. We were being steered into a needless war with the Arabs, hotly desired by Israel and its supporters but contrary to our own real interests.
As for the Sobrans, two of them – my sons Kent and Mike – were in their teens. If, as seemed likely, the military draft was restored, they might be sent to fight the war the Zionists were seeking. I began arguing in my syndicated column for American disengagement from Israel.
Shortly afterward I ran into Ben Wattenberg, one of my friends (I thought), who said he’d heard I’d “gone off the reservation on Israel.” It was the first time I’d been informed that I was on a “reservation,” but I soon learned what he meant.
Despite various warnings and pressures – veiled threats, really – I wasn’t about to back down or retract anything. As far as I was concerned, I was fighting for my boys’ lives. But if I wanted to thrive in journalism, I was expected to put Jewish interests ahead of everything, or at least keep quiet.
As I told Bill Buckley at the time, the Jewish- Zionist interest amounted to an unacknowledged third party in American politics. Though it had been traditionally liberal, it had sprouted a “neo-conservative” wing since 1967. In truth, the neo-conservatives were hardly conservative at all. For most of them, Israel was everything and overrode all other issues. You could agree with them on nine out of ten issues, but if the tenth was Israel the other nine didn’t matter to them. You were the enemy.
You couldn’t really feel the power of the Jewish Party until you ran up against it. With amazing speed it had thoroughly satellized the largely Christian conservative movement, thanks in large part to Buckley. He wasn’t about to let me imperil his position. He tried to tell me so, in his indirect and avuncular way, but I couldn’t take a hint.
Luckily, I was a fairly small fry in the movement, and the Jewish Party had far bigger antagonists to target for destruction. I didn’t get the full treatment Buckley would have gotten if he’d said what I had said, or the treatment Pat Buchanan did get.
Still, when the blowup came I felt deserted — and in some cases betrayed — by my fellow conservatives. Much as I wished they would rush to my defense, I also wished that if this was too much to ask, they would at least see the “meaning” of what was being done to me.
Put simply, I was paying the price for “defending American interests” (and conservative principles). If, as the neocons insisted, American and Israeli interests were more or less identical, they should have called me anti-American, not (or not only) anti-Semitic. But of course they never did; they weren’t that subtle, and in some ways they were deeply confused.
Without realizing it, they were tacitly admitting that I was right: that American and Israeli interests were very different – even conflicting – things. Why else would Israel need a lobby in America at all, except to promote its interests to the detriment of our own? This should be obvious, but most people don’t get it.
Of course there is no American lobby in Israel to look out for our interests, regardless of the impact on Israeli interests. This is only one of the many unnoticed asymmetries of the situation. Double standards can succeed in their furtive purpose only when they pass unobserved. But to call attention to double standards favoring Jews is “anti-Semitism.” According to Zionist rhetoric, of course, only anti-Semites apply double standards – though in fact Zionism’s first principle is that ordinary standards of justice don’t apply to Jews. As one Israeli rabbi has put it, “A million Arabs are not worth one Jewish fingernail.”
That sounds like a defiantly brutal denial that “all men are created equal.” The rabbi may have meant that it would be better to murder a million Arabs than to tolerate the slightest Jewish loss. But he might have meant something much less bellicose, something even pacific: that the current tradeoff of Jewish and Arab lives is a terrible thing for the Jews, even if far more Arabs than Jews die. Nobody really wins a war that diminishes both sides.
It may be said that all this amounts to a caricature of the Jews. In fact, I’ll say it myself. It’s really a self-caricature of the Jews, drawn by the prevalent part of the Jewish community. It reflects neither the older tradition of the Orthodox, which is rooted in the hard objectivity of Mosaic law rather than modern sentimental victimology; nor the immense variety of Jewish intellectuals, who are as the sands of the sea but who don’t usually subscribe fully to the oversimplified myths of the Holocaust and Zionism.
The Orthodox Jew, faithful to an ancient and rigorous tradition, commands respect. So, in a different way, does the nonobservant intellectual Jew, who greatly enriches the life of the mind in the modern West; he remains unobsessed by the Holocaust and skeptical of, even embarrassed by, Zionism. In some cases, both the Orthodox Jew and the unaffiliated intellectual Jew may be downright anti-Zionist.
The plague-carriers, so to speak, are the secularized, liberal, middlebrow Jews whose vulgarity sets the tone for American politics, public discourse, and popular culture. Some of them, like Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand, have real talent, of sorts; most of them are good at making money and aggressive in using it for their pet causes. Above all, they have a low genius for propaganda – for shaping the popular mind and its characteristic platitudes.
This is the prevalent body of Jews, our unacknowledged third party – the party of Zionism, Holocaust promotion, secularism, sexual license (including “gay rights” and legal abortion), and an aggressive U.S. foreign policy (in the interests of Israel, not the United States itself). The Jewish Party, only a small fraction of the U.S. population, donates more than half the money received by the presidential candidates of the two major parties. It also dominates the major news and entertainment media.
The Jewish Party’s inordinate power, though unmentionable in the major media, explains why gentiles, especially the ambitious, dread the label of “anti-Semitism.” Some of the most perceptive, sensitive, and effective critiques of Jewish power – that is, of the Jewish Party — have been made by Orthodox and intellectual Jews. One danger of the present situation is that the Jewish Party will become synonymous with “the Jews.”
And this is exactly what the Party wants: to be recognized as the only authoritative Jewish voice, with all dissenting Jews marginalized. Under the brutal rule of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s image in the West is worse than ever before. Today it’s startling to remember the radiant aura it enjoyed in the days when its chief international spokesman was the urbane and eloquent Abba Eban. Those days are gone forever. The old image of a humane, democratic Israel was largely myth – a myth Sharon himself still exploits – but at least the Israelis made some effort to maintain its plausibility. Now, as Israeli soldiers shoot Arab women in labor without official rebuke or regret, the ugliness of Zionism has become visible to anyone with eyes to see.
Shouting “Holocaust” and “anti-Semitism” can no longer disguise the facts. Despite all the rhetoric, Israel is a “democracy” only in a Pickwickian sense. It began by expelling most of its Arab majority, seizing its homes, and refusing it reentry. That created a Jewish majority, which has been maintained and increased by extending to every Jew on earth the “right of return” to a land where few of those Jews (or for that matter, of their ancestors) had ever lived in the first place. Yet the fiction of Israeli democracy is still honored by the United States.
The Great Obsession has become a huge embarrassment for the Bush administration. It can’t repudiate the U.S. alliance with Israel, even as it needs international – especially Arab – support for the “war on terrorism.” Of course that war itself is a result of the Obsession, which has shaped American foreign policy for decades.
The embarrassment is also a Laocoon-like entanglement. Polite diplomacy flounders in the vain quest for a peaceful settlement; Rome and Carthage are trying to destroy each other, and both sides are invited to a tea party.
As suicide bombings alternate with disproportionate yet unavailing retaliations, the daily news from Israel is so painful that we all yearn for a solution. But it’s probably too late. It has been wisely said that even the greatest chess player can’t take over a misplayed game after 40 moves. This game is clearly destined to end – or to continue indefinitely – in tragedy. The only question is how many millions of people will be engulfed in its flames.
I’ve noticed that whenever anyone asks me why I’m “obsessed” with this or that, it is a put-down. Heroes are determined and obstinate but perverts are “obsessed.”
If I had to choose sides between Sobran and those who hounded him out of public life, I’d choose Joseph Sobran. That does not mean I agree with everything he wrote, I simply don’t believe he said anything that deserves excommunication.
Wikipedia says:
In 2001 and 2003 Sobran spoke at conferences organized by David Irving, sharing the podium with Paul Fromm, Charles D. Provan, and Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review. In 2002 he spoke at the Institute for Historical Review’s annual conference.[9] In his speech, which he also reprinted in his newsletter, Sobran said:
I am not, heaven forbid, a “Holocaust denier.” I lack the scholarly competence to be one. … Why on earth is it ‘anti-Jewish’ to conclude from the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial extermination? Surely these are controversial conclusions; but if so, let the controversy rage.
Showing up at conferences reexamining conventional historical narratives is not a horrible thing. While emotionally it disturbs me, and while I believe that those who devote their lives to minimizing the Holocaust are not doing good, I’m not going to dismiss Joseph Sobran for these choices.
Some Jews have wielded the Holocaust as a weapon for getting what they want and so it only makes sense that people who disagree with the things they’ve pushed (such as the beauties of diversity) will want to take a second look at that club.
As Stephen Steinlight wrote in 2001: “That America has largely tolerated this dual loyalty — we get a free pass, I suspect, largely over Christian guilt about the Holocaust — makes it no less a reality.”
I get my values from Torah and because of that, I’m not hysterical about people such as Joseph Sobran and others who question conventional thinking about Jews. There is no mitzva in Torah for fighting anti-Semitism and there is no mitzva in Torah against attending conferences questioning the veracity of historical claims.
Jack* says: “Even after he was booted out of National Review and lost his syndication papers, Drudge used to link to his internet columns. I first ran across him right after 9/11 2001, and read his old stuff through his archives and all his newest stuff. He really got a raw deal. Although he downplays how he was treated compared to Pat Buchanan, that is really not true. Buchanan continues to be widely read and viewed and he continues to produce new books. Sobran was really made an example of, which is both horrible, but also understandable. This is a guy who could write circles around anyone else. Even though he primarily wrote for the old National Review, he was published in a variety of newspapers (The L.A. Times used to syndicate him) and because he was so clear in his writing, he was persuasive. Many conservatives wrote tributes to him when he died.”
