Jews and ethnic panic

The New Republic’s cover story for their May 27th edition is a sobering piece entitled “Hitler is Dead: Against Ethnic Panic” by Leon Wieseltier, which provides a good complement to the Edward Said piece I mentioned below. Whereas Said speaks of political stridency among American Jews, Wieseltier disects the historical antecedents behind the recent “Second Holocaust” flames that are being fanned by some Jews:

[…] there is a Jewish panic now. The savagery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the virulent anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the Arab world, the rise in anti-Jewish words and deeds in Europe: All this has left many Jews speculating morbidly about being the last Jews. And the Jews of the United States significantly exceed the Jews of Israel in this morbidity. The community is sunk in excitability, in the imagination of disaster. There is a loss of intellectual control.

Of course, some Palestinians and supporters are not adverse to using Holocaust references for their own rhetorical ends. From another article by Wieseltier I noted this quote from the Portugese writer Jose Saramago who commented after visiting Arafat in Ramallah during the recent Israeli offensive, “Though there are differences of time and place, what is happening here is a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz. They are turning this place into a concentration camp.”