Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] IN THE CLASSROOM 247
in his interview with the Lithuanian prime minister, is that for many East
Europeans, who invoke them, Communist crimes are a byword for “Jewish
crimes,” in keeping with the Nazi equation of Bolsheviks and Jews that
harks back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and thence to the age-old
metaphysical apprehension of an anti-Christian coup spearheaded by the
Satanic Jews (see Norman Cohn’s studies, The Pursuit of the Millennium
[1975] and Warrant for Genocide [1981]). As such, the invocation of Communist
crimes not just obfuscates the issue of local responsibility but
absolves the perpetrators by turning their actions into acts of self-defense
against “The International Jew.” The fact that a New York Times columnist
with intimate knowledge of British Judeophobia should prove so blind to
such a basic element of the discourse of Jewish difference is an argument
for the urgency of educating young people, Gentiles and Jews, in the history
and structure of this discourse.
This pedagogical task is particularly urgent in the case of young Jews,
whose responses to the course material give me more reason for alarm than
those of students from non-Jewish backgrounds. How can I forget the bright
Jewish girl, educated in Toronto’s most prestigious secular Jewish day
school, informing me with matter-of-fact innocence that “Kids at school
used to say that Jews killed Jesus”? Or that young man who, closer to the
end of the course, came to my office to ask, “How did they allow you to
teach a course like that?” as if I were imparting to students some secret
knowledge that a mythical “they” had conspired to keep hidden at arm’s
reach in the nearest library or (online) bookstore. Not to mention the regular
“coming out” of Jewish students in whose families Jewish identity is a
taboo subject and who discover in the course of an academic semester both
the inspiration and the tools for an adolescent rebellion against their “Jewishly
repressed” baby-boomer parents. All this is conveyed through semiwhispering
confessions recalling the meaningful winks and nods of mutual
recognition and understanding exchanged by Soviet Jews in the gray years
of Brezhnev’s reign.
In general, I think we are in for a bumpy ride as some members of the
aging Jewish intelligentsia of the baby boom generation face the mounting
pressure to reconcile the leftward political leanings of their youth with the
growing anti-Zionism (read Jew-hatred) of the culture of the left. The recent
public rows around Tony Kushner and Tony Judt are portents of more
things to come (for the lovers of forecasts, I recommend a David Remnick
watch, as The New Yorker under his editorship is becoming a clearinghouse
of leftist platitudes about Israel). This will be the context in which today’s
young Jews reach their intellectual maturity, and it is of paramount importance
to give them the factual knowledge and analytical tools that will
enable them to understand and deal with the latest developments in the long