This should be it...

So Harvard doesn't endorse the Walt-Mearsheimer paper. How about Chicago? Haaretz doesn't say. So how about Chicago itself--am I missing something? Really, nothing? It's spring break, so the Maroon hasn't yet produced the inevitable outpouring of pro-and-con. If Chicago has any sort of official statement on this, I'd be curious to know what it is. Is leaving the whole thing off the news site an indication of a lack of endorsement, or just a less-than-thorough Googling on the part of whoever puts the site together? I sort of doubt it's the latter, as that site's usually quite thorough. But back to the unofficial response...

I still fail to see why Drezner is so confident that assertions that Walt and Mearsheimer are anti-Semites are completely unfounded. The Forward piece Drezner praises comes to the only possible conclusion, that the authors of the paper "blame the Jews." As I've already made quite clear, the authors' anti-Semitism is not inferred from their criticism of Israel, nor even from their assertion that American Jews assert their interests more succesfully than do other groups in America, but that Jewish interests run against American interests, even while "American interests" encompasses all sorts of other conflicting goals and minority preferences.

The Jewish fear of complaining about anti-Semitism, of being seen as whiny, cannot be underestimated. From French Jews, then and now, speaking up enthusiastically for "universal rights of man" and speaking out against "racism" whenever the most blatantly, violently anti-Semitic acts occur, to American Jews who need to preface all praise of Israel with how of course they are highly critical of its evil, evil leadership. But anti-Semitism's been around so long, often in quite the same form, so it's easily recognizable what's anti-Semitic and what's not. Assertions that the Jews control everything, from indie theater to the U.S. foreign policy? Whine away.

But the other issue here is that, as the Forward pointed out, the "authors are not fringe gadflies but two of America's most respected foreign-affairs theorists." In other words, they are important, and they speak in measured tones and with authority. This could be why the LRB article reminded me of Bernard Lazare's Antisemitism: its history and causes. Lazare, a French Jew writing over 100 years ago, before the Dreyfus Affair changed his opinion on everything, wrote a scholarly account of anti-Semitism. Clearly well-researched, and presented in that same calm, dry, voice used by Mearsheimer and Walt, from a "neutral" perspective, despite the seeming contradiction of how on earth could someone Jewish write a neutral account of a movement which would have him disappear, Antisemitism explains, throughout history, how the Jews have pretty much had it coming to them. Lazare sees Jewish behavior as not simply causing but actually justifying much of their mistreatment from the outside world. Reading this, I was struck by how little Lazare's argument differed from a suggestion that, since women all around the world are raped and beaten by men for no apparent reason, the fault must lie in women themselves, since clearly femaleness is the cause of this violence.

Like Walt and Mearsheimer, whose work was praised by David Duke, Lazare's work was lauded by none other than original French anti-Semitic propagandist Edouard Drumont, author of La France juive. And Lazare, like our professors, claimed that his arguments were scholarly ones, and did not want to be associated with crude, irrational bigotry. The difference between Lazare and these recent authors is that Lazare was writing at a time when it was not yet evident just how readily the world would take up the cause of removing Jews from all power, real or imagined. It did not take the Holocaust for Lazare to change his mind about the Jews bringing about anti-Semitism by having the audacity to go around being Jewish--the Dreyfus Affair was enough, and apparently by the time Antisemitism hit the Barnes and Nobles and Borders of 19th century France, its author no longer supported its message. It is not clear what greater good will come from Mearsheimer and Walt announcing, with weak and/or misinterpreted supporting evidence, that a nefarious cabal of "pro-Israel," "neoconservative" types control the United States government. Neither the greater good of scholarly or political truth, nor the greater good (surely, from their perspective) of making Jews in the U.S. feel more at home, and less inclined to care much either way about Israel. And I think this is key--Diaspora Jewish support of Israel comes, often enough, not from a desire to take over the world, but a sense that things might not work out so well elsewhere.