On Tuesday, Gore Vidal died at the age of 86. In response to readers’ requests, we have made available Norman Podhoretz’s famous essay on Vidal, “The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” Originally published in the November 1986 issue of COMMENTARY, the piece exposes both Vidal’s hatred for Israel and his steadfast enthusiasm for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Jews.
The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Norman Podhoretz — November 1986
Last March, in a special issue commemorating its 120th anniversary, the Nation published an article by the novelist Gore Vidal entitled “The Empire Lovers Strike Back” which impressed me and many other people as the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II. The Nation is a left-wing (or, some would say, a liberal) magazine run by an editor, Victor Navasky, who is himself Jewish. Yet one reader (who happened not to be Jewish) wrote in a personal letter to Navasky that he could not recall encountering “that kind of naked anti-Semitism” even in papers of the lunatic-fringe Right which specialize in attacks on Jews; to find its like one had to go back to the Völkische Beobachter. Nor was he the only reader to be reminded of the Nazi gutter press. “I thought I was back in the 30′s reading Der Stürmer,” wrote another.
Actually, however, it was not the crackpot racism of Julius Streicher that Vidal was drawing on, but sources closer to home. Prominent among these, I would guess, was Henry Adams, about whom Vidal has written admiringly and with whom he often seems to identify. Adams, as a descendant of two Presidents, was a preeminent member of the old American patriciate—the class to which Vidal also, if somewhat dubiously, claims to belong—and his resentment at the changes which came over the United States in the decades of industrialization and mass immigration after the Civil War knew no bounds. The country was being ruined, and Adams blamed it all on the Jews: “I tell you Rome was a blessed garden of paradise beside the rotten, unsexed, swindling, lying Jews, represented by Pierpont Morgan and the gang who have been manipulating the country for the last few years.” It made no difference that J.P. Morgan was neither Jewish himself nor in any sense a representative of the Jews. For as Adams wrote in another of his letters: “The Jew has got into the soul. I see him—or her—now everywhere, and wherever he—or she—goes, there must remain a taint in the blood forever.”
Click here to read “The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name” in its entirety.
Cockburn and Vidal die within 10 days of one another. Chomsky should see a doctor immediately.
Please make an appointment for him
Might I note that, in addition to being an all around mountebank, Gore Vidal also helped raise money for NAAMBLA? In short, he supported pederasty. n nCockburn and Vidal are two who deserve a shared berth on the 9th Circle of Hades.
if chomsky would take his own life it would be the first good deed he's done.
Isn't it amazing how 12 million people (less than 1/6 of 1% of the world's population) — people who for 2 thousand years have be killed, tortured and tormented by the other 99.6% of the world's population, with pogroms, gas chambers, inquisitions and continual anti-semitic harassment– somehow has been able to control the world? n nWhat does that say about the Jews? More importantly, what does that say about the non-Jews?
Indians and Chinese and other far Easterners should not be included in the 99.6%. Only the Christians ( and post Christians = socialists, communists, far right, Lutherians etc… and Muslims)
It's that voodoo that we do so well.
Yeah. I keep on asking these antisemitic posters when it is my turn in the caves of Bermuda to control the world money supply (someone's lost the roster with my name on it), 'cause I'd love to fly the kids out and claim the hotel room as a business expense (so no one knows I'm in the caves, you see)—but they never seem to know. n nHenry Adams was quite undistinguished. Outside of History Classes at the advanced Uni level, no one I know reads him today. Thus always to Amalek.
Plus ca change, plus ca reste le meme chose. Change a few of the names and specific world events, and this article could have been written in 2012. Anti-semitism is here forever. No amount of public shaming will wipe it out, alas.
mutatis mutandis, as Normon Podhoretz says in the linked article. but 1986 was a veritable golden age compared to what we've got now: Israeli Apartheid Weeks an annual fixture at top universities, the Palestinians claiming the Israelis are trying to "judaize" Jerusalem (kinda like the Saudis trying to Islamize Mecca), and the president of the United States is pro-Palestinian. n n
Bastard Full of jealousy and probably rich but not on his own as would say our dear Pr. O.
My mother always told me to say good about the dead. n nGore Vidal is Dead. n nGood!
I don't know. I heard some guy going on and on on NPR this afternoon about how he and his dear friend and traveling companion Gore would stay up the night chatting madly about politics and aesthetics and empire and American decline and this and that and how Gore, who did so love a good dust-up in pubic, in private was such a tender and charitable soul. And all I could think was, "Okay so were you the mommy and he was the daddy? Or was it the reverse?"
I remember discussing Norman Podhoretz’s brave and brilliant article with my father, more than 25 years ago. He had escaped the Nazis, much of his family had not. He was horrified at the idea that the pestilence that he had thought had finally been left behind, was back again, and in America no less.
The intervening years have shown this terrible recrudescence growing rather than abating. Podhoretz was right to sound the alarm and to point to the left as the source of the contagion.
But, ultimately I think he was wrong and his opponents were right. We are dealing with something other, or at least more, than “the old hate”. The real danger does not come from the old anti-Semitism. It comes rather from the “decent” people, the Pfaffs, Yoders and Wickers who were and are prepared to excuse that blatant Jew hatred. Because they are in fact themselves offended by Israel. Why?
She exists today as a result of defying the genocidal hate of neighbors who outnumber her 50 to 1. She has beaten them not just through the abilities of her soldiers but also her farmers, mechanics, artists, scientist, scholars, etc.
Israel’s dilemma is that to live she must affront the spirit of the age. WWII shaped modernity. Thad conflict had pitted Aryan racism against equality and democracy. The latter prevailed.
Israel however, to survive, has been forced to prevail over vast odds. In this she appears to the Third World and to the Left as a living refutation of their moral stanchions, in what they have put their trust. This is what has made “decent” people wary and resentful of Israel and yet recoil at the charge of anti-Semitism.
The situation is unjust, it is crazy, but it is what has caused much of the world, and many Americans to view six million Jews in Israel as the enemies of peace, the heirs of the Nazis, etc.
We can respond with indignation. But that will not overcome the problem. It requires a different solution.
I remember discussing Norman Podhoretz’s brilliant article with my father, more than 25 years ago. He had escaped the Nazis, much of his family had not. He was horrified that the pestilence that he had thought had finally been left behind, was back again, and in America no less. n nThe intervening years have shown this terrible recrudescence growing rather than abating. Podhoretz was brave to sound the alarm and to identify the left as the source of the contagion. And yet, ultimately, I think it was his opponents who were right. n nThe looming danger is something other than simply, "the old hate". Anti-Semitism remains a factor, of course, but the problem is larger. It involves Podhoretz's "decent" people, the Pfaffs, Yoders and Wickers who are not anti Semites and yet they are offended by Israel. Why? n nShe survives today because she has managed to defy the genocidal hate of neighbors who outnumber her 50 to 1. She has been forced to repeatedly defeat them, and has not just proved the abilities of her soldiers but also of her farmers, mechanics, artists, scientist, scholars, etc. n nIn that feat Israel affronts the spirit of the age. WWII shaped modernity. That conflict had pitted Aryan racism against equality and democracy. The latter prevailed. n nYet now, Israel has been forced to beat vast odds. In this she appears to the Third World and to the Left as a living refutation of what they have put their trust in, their most fundamental beliefs, their moral stanchions. It is this, I think, that has made "decent" people wary and resentful of Israel and indignant at the charge of anti-Semitism. n nCrazy or not, that is why much of the world, and many Americans view six million Jews in Israel as the enemies of peace, the heirs of the Nazis, etc. n nThe situation could not be more unjust. We can respond with anger and outrage. But that is not a solution. It requires a different answer.
This is a very good post, describing a very important piece of the puzzle. n n
How many recipe do the japanese have for these things?
Part two: n nMobster "Buggsy Siegel" may or may not have been Jewish (I honestly don't care) but presuming he was, there is a wild logical leap from that to saying (as Leonard Jefferies does) that "the Jews are responsible for all of organized crime." There is this little issue of coincidence and causation – not unlike how maybe the VT shooter and the Batman shooter were mentally ill — but that does not mean that people with mental illnesses are dangerous. Coincidence not causation. n nSecond, Jewish scholars are going to have to do a far better job of explaining Jewish theology to the outside world. Some of the more vile antisemetic stuff has legs because it is based on utter falsehoods that those unfamiliar with the cited theology don't know not to be true. And it isn't enough to just say that they are false (although this does need to be done), there is a greater need to explain what the actual writing or belief truly is, and what it is believed today to actually mean. n nA related example, involving Ibish, related to a Holocaust-era refugee boat known as the Petra, which had arrived in the then-British Palestine and which was to be sent back to Europe. Ibish fabricated (from whole cloth) the allegation that the "evil Zionists" blew up the boat so as to kill everyone aboard to make a political point – he actually was far more disgusting than even this – and while I took anything Ibish said/wrote with a few cubic yards of salt, who was to say this wasn't true. nAnd that is why it was so valuable for CAMERA to come in and explained that they were actually trying to break the propeller shaft so the boat couldn't be forced to leave, but between not knowing how to use explosives and the boat being essentially unseaworthy anyway, they instead blew the whole bottom off the boat and she went down like a stone with great loss of life. A completely different story, and while truth *is* stronger than falsehood, it has to be given a fair chance. n nAnd third — and this is the truly controversial one — a Jewish identity has to be balanced against an American identity. This already exists – it is why the "Israel First" insult both is an insult and is considered so offensive — but it is the ongoing challenge of any uniquely identifiable group in America. There is no answer to this, only to recognize it as an ongoing problem for all groups in America — something that goes back to before the Revolution and the desire of the German immigrants to celebrate the Germanic holiday of Christmas — much to the chagrin of the Puritan majority that didn't.
Vidal's partner of many years was a Jew.