Tony Judt on anti-anti-Semitism

to London today, to interview Tony Judt. Very interesting man: one thing, which may not make the interview, that he said when we were discussing American attitudes to Europe and Israel. Since courses in European history became optional twenty five years ago or so, no one under 35 in the USA knows anything about European history. But there is one exception: in many, perhaps most states, there is a compulsory high school course in holocaust studies, or world War Two, or Nazism — they are all more or less the same, and they all teach the Second World War as if it were primarily about the extermination of European Jewry. Now that may have been the most important thing about it morally, or in retrospect. but it wasn’t the most important thing at the time for anyone outside two groups, the Nazis and the Jews. It wasn’t the most politically important thing about the war. But “most young Americans’ understanding of Europe is shaped by this sense that the dominant characteristic of recent European history is the propensity to kill jews … I worry that in the states we live in a situation, without it even being party-political propaganda, where people grow up with the idea that Europe is permanently disposed to kill Jews, and that only Israel and of course with it America, stands as an impediment against this. And under those circumstances, of course, all criticism of Israel does indeed look like handing gifts to anti-Semites.”

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