It’s easy to criticize what Christopher Hitchens has said about Judaism and Israel. I have done it myself at great length, in 2007. But I think that in 2010, on balance, I’d call Hitchens objectively pro-Zionist, and an indispensable voice for human freedom.
Today’s issue of Jewish Ideas Daily has a long feature story by Benjamin Kerstein detailing, with great meticulousness, the anti-Zionist and even anti-Semitic arguments that Christopher Hitchens has made over the years - prompted by Hitchens’ latest fusillade in Slate on November 15th. Kerstein is careful, accurate, and almost entirely misses the point of Hitchens’s opposition to Israel, his hatred of Hanukkah and Judaism (on display vividly in his amusing neo-atheist screed “God Ruins Everything”), and his leftist anti-nationalism. Allow me to quote my own comment on Kerstein’s piece:
“. . . it is imperative to recognize our true friends and distinguish them from our true enemies, and though what you say of Hitchens’s remarks of Jews and Judaism is accurate in the narrow sense, you are at the same time profoundly wrong about him.
I am parti pris, since my 2007 Commentary review of Hitchens’s “God is Not Great” pointed out Hitchens’s very peculiar Hanukkah-hatred, and elaborated on his multifarious misunderstandings of that festival, from the mundane - blaming it incorrectly and provincially for being a rip-off of Christmas to the weirdly idealistic and hateful - all pointing to Hitchens’s bizarre contention that if it were not for the survival of Judaism, “we might have been spared the whole thing” - as if religion then would have withered away as the Communist state would do.
“I cite - reluctantly - my denunciation of Hitchens’s anti-Hanukkahism (http://tinyurl.com/32cd62l) to give me the standing to say this about Kerstein’s conclusion: he is utterly wrong about Hitchens’s supposed anti-Semitism. The hostility that Hitchens expresses to Jewish history, and indeed, to the very existence of Jews and Judaism, while reprehensible and idiotic in itself, is also harmless and pitiable - it is a relic of Hitchens’s leftist identity, which he cannot give up. On the other hand, his standing as an enemy of the enemy of the actual, contemporary enemies of Judaism, the Jews and even Israel, is something that a Zionist and a Jew should cherish, and is much more effective than his arguments against the Jewish state, which are dated even in their own terms - an historical relic of 1960s leftwing anti-Zionism with no effect.
“In practice, Hitchens is so loathed by the real anti-Semitic left and the left in general that his few anti-Israel rants are ignored - but his eloquent denunciation of terrorism and his support of the Bush doctrine and the defense of the West nobly supports Israel’s legitimacy and the survival of the Jews there and everywhere in the democratic west. He is a treasure to be cherished by us - someone who hates anti-Semitism more effectively and more authentically than any number of Jews ands self-proclaimed friends of the Jews. If he has a problem with Hanukkah - well, I wish (to compare puny men like me with great men like Lincoln), like Lincoln said of General Grant’s drinking problem, we had many more friends of democracy and freedom with Hitchens’s Hanukkah problem.”
The arguments in the comment thread to Kerstein’s piece are fascinating - I recommend reading the piece and all the reactions, and thank Benjamin Kerstein for reminding us how valuable a friend Hitchens can be. In general, the lesson is that the expression of conventionally anti-Semitic sentiments is not a particularly refined indicator of real malignity, any more than the expression “I can’t be anti-Semitic - I’m Jewish,” is a reliable indicator of someone who cares for the right of Jews to live in freedom, or to deserve to live at all.
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