Letters

Anti-Semitism

To the Vanguard,

I am writing to question the parallel that Drew Long has drawn between the response to the paper “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by Harvard professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, and McCarthyism. The purpose of this letter is not to discuss the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, mostly because this is not my area of expertise. However, I do wonder about Mr. Long’s qualifications to judge such a paper. He refers to the work as “well-researched and properly supported.” How is he able to look at a 42-page document with an additional 40 pages of endnotes and declare it completely sound?

Of course, both Mr. Long and I were able to form an opinion about the paper because it can be found on the web site of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Despite his hyperbolical references to “a new form of McCarthyism,” it appears that the article has not been blacklisted from the university web site. The document is still accessible to all (and probably has been more widely read than it would have been without all of the fuss).

The key to Mr. Long’s criticism appears to be the withdrawal of the Harvard name from the title page of the paper. Harvard is not the first, nor will it be the last, institution that has supported a document only to recant or moderate its support at a later date. For instance, the publisher of the once highly touted novel by Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, recently withdrew the book from stores because of charges of plagiarism. There is nothing sinister at work when this happens, no conspiracy led by an all-powerful cabal to silence an unpopular viewpoint. Institutions make mistakes, rectify them, and move on.

Additionally, documents, articles and books are often published that do not portray the state of Israel in a flattering light, yet not every one of those works is challenged or called anti-Semitic. This particular paper, however, has been called anti-Semitic, and by more than one commentator. Rather than seeing this as evidence of conspiracy, perhaps Mr. Long should entertain the notion that individuals and institutions came to this conclusion independently. Logically, if we support the right of two professors to write such a paper, then we must also support the rights of other individuals to respond to what they perceive to be the document’s shortcomings.

Mr. Long is incredulous, too, at the idea that Vanguard op-ed writer Caelan MacTavish could be branded an anti-Semite for his “staggering work of amateurish ignorance” and that Mearsheimer and Walt could also be branded as such for what Mr. Long calls “their well-researched work of investigative scholarship.” Unfortunately, hostility toward Jews has always been democratic in its nature. Not only the ignorant and the uneducated but also individuals possessed of higher education and even genius have committed anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic thoughts to paper: Martin Luther, Voltaire, Richard Wagner and T.S. Eliot are only a few examples.

Perhaps it is best to remember the statement of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he referred to attempts to compel universities to divest from the state of Israel. In a widely quoted speech, Summers called these sanctions “anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” Caelan MacTavish, in his earlier op-ed article, might be termed an unintentional anti-Semite in that his crude attempts to discuss the Israeli-Arab conflict utilized anti-Semitic stereotypes and untruths that he later admitted were ignorant and unfounded. Drew Long’s article, while in no way utilizing the same anti-Semitic canards, is only convincing to those willing to swallow whole all of the assertions of Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper and, at the same time, to dismiss with a wave of the hand any and all criticism of this document as McCarthyism stemming from pressure by an all-powerful Israel lobby.

The effect of Mr. Long’s article, therefore, worries me just as much, if not more, than his intent.

Linda Maizels
Doctoral student and instructor for History 410, Modern Anti-Semitism
Master’s in history, Portland State University, 1999