by George W. Liebmann

ased on news clippings and prepared, according to its acknowledgments, “under the strain of a tight deadline,” Gabriel Schoenfeld’s The Return of Anti-Semitism is a polemical work that represents itself as a survey of contemporary anti-Semitism in its Islamic, European, and American manifestations. The book is virtually bereft of hard data. Readers will find no polling results, no crime or employment statistics, no evidence of discrimination, and little history. Moreover, the conclusion acknowledges that what the author describes as anti-Semitism accelerated at the time of the Palestinian intifada in 2000 and “does appear to be an epiphenomenon of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” A book with such an ill-founded premise is unlikely to yield much light, though this one does generate a good deal of heat.

The work begins with a survey of the Islamic world, noting with appropriate alarm the radical nature of Pakistani Islamic schools and the use by leaders in Iran and Malaysia of rhetoric that is both anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic in the original sense. The writer straddles the question of whether Islam is inherently anti-Semitic, but he does refer to the thinking of Norman Podhoretz—whose speech to the 2001 American Enterprise Institute dinner characterized Islam in a way which would have caused an uproar if applied to any faith more widely held in the United States—as “a lodestar” on the subject.

Schoenfeld’s data about Asian antisemitism, however haphazardly assembled, is indeed alarming, as is his description of its infiltration into Islamic communities in Western Europe. However, when Schoenfeld leaves the Islamic peoples to assert that “the music is piped in from abroad, the dancing takes place at home,” his book leaves the rails.

The book is a shot in the “culture wars” which seeks to deflect criticism of the current Israeli government, and the policy of the Bush administration with respect to Iraq and Palestine, by indiscriminately tarring critics of both with the brush of anti-Semitism and by demonizing or marginalizing those who hold opposing views. Schoenfeld is at least explicit in stating his proposition that “anti-Semitism is the right and only word for [one-sided] anti-Zionism.”

The anti-Israeli fulminations of Noam Chomsky and others are to be deplored, as are their equally uncivil and intemperate denunciations of American policy in Vietnam

George W. Liebmann is an attorney in Baltimore and the author of several books, including Six Lost Leaders: Prophets of Civil Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), and Solving Problems Without Large Government: Devolution, Fairness and Equality (Praeger, 2000).

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