Noam Chomsky has made a shocking discovery:
In the West, fortunately, [anti-Semitism] scarcely exists now, though it did in the past. There is, of course, what the Anti-Defamation League calls “the real anti-Semitism”, more dangerous than the old-fashioned kind: criticism of policies of the state of Israel and US support for them, opposition to a vast US military budget, etc. In contrast, anti-Arab racism is rampant. The manifestations are shocking, in elite intellectual circles as well, but arouse little concern because they are considered legitimate: the most extreme form of racism.
Pejman Yousefzadeh points out several examples of anti-Semitism, mainly in Europe. Ian at Inoperable Terran makes fun of Chomsky’s name and implies he wears buttocks headgear. Meryl Yourish has yet to comment, but I suspect she would disagree with Chomsky as well.
Now, while I find Chomsky to be amazingly irritating, he’s no idiot. He’s also a Jew. So how could he say such a thing? Well, for one thing, he’s 74. He thus has vague personal memories of the Holocaust and his family surely experienced massive anti-Semitism in the Philadelphia of that era. It may simply be that he’s using a much higher threshold definition. He may mean that there’s not much real anti-Semitism anymore in the sense that Dinesh D’Souza meant that we’ve experienced The End of Racism. (Interesting aside: Dean Esmay is the first reviewer on the Amazon listing.) If that’s what he’s saying, he’s probably right. We certainly don’t have the same degree and type of anti-Semitism as we had in the 1950s and before.
The other explanation–and they’re not mutually exclusive–is that Chomsky is a highly successful intellectual living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This means that he has spent the preponderance of the past half-century or so among the people who are among the least likely to be anti-Semitic. And, indeed, he has thrived in a profession where Jews have long been prominent even if, as Alan Dershowitz has noted, they weren’t supposed to “act Jewish.” (“Dress British, think Yiddish.” )
Still, I find the rather offhanded way he deals with the subject puzzling. As a guy who “revolutionised the study of language,” he should have realized that his statement would have created an uproar. One would think he’d have at least elaborated a bit.
