In the September 20 Review section of the Wall Street Journal, Dominic Green took up a new book on anti-Semitism in “A poisonous history.” Mr. Green is the author of the pseudonymous Spectator column (attributed to “Cockburn”) reviewing the evidence of Ilhan Omar’s marriage to her brother. I know Mr. Green wrote it because he called me while he was working on it to ask me a few questions. It is the work of a serious historian. That column remains accessible online inside the Daily Mail story posted here.
As for the book under review, Green writes, “It pains me to say that On Antisemitism is consistently partisan, frequently incoherent and, especially in its final chapters, studiously unwilling to illuminate the present.” As for anti-Semitism itself, Green writes:
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An inerrant harbinger of disaster, first for Jews and then for everyone else, antisemitism is institutionally entrenched on the American left and increasingly noisome on the podcast right. In a divided America, hating Jews is the sour spot that unites Islamists and Christian nationalists, white supremacists and black nationalists, college professors and the criminally insane. America the exceptional, the only Western society where Jews have lived as normal people, is now exceptional only in the diversity of groups with Jews on the brain.
Whole thing here (behind the Journal paywall).
