In Defense of the Jews

Jamie Glazov, FrontPage:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Solway, the award-winning author of over twenty-five books of poetry, criticism, educational theory, and travel. He is a contributor to magazines as varied as The Atlantic, the Sewanee Review, Books in Canada, and the Partisan Review. His book, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, was a Canadian bestseller. A former leftist, he abandoned the political faith after 9/11. He is the author of the new book, Hear, O Israel!

FP: David Solway, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us about this new collection of essays.

Solway: Hear, O Israel! is not so much a collection of essays as a sequence of chapters connected by what I might call subdural links, not always evident to the external eye. The arrangement is intended to build a sort of intuitive momentum. Also, when I use the word “Israel” in the title, I’m referring not exclusively to the country of Israel but the peoplehood of Jews, whether in Israel, Canada, the U.S., or wherever they may be found–in Nunavut or on Mars, if it comes to that.

In other words, I’m asking not the country but the nation to listen to the seismic rumble of antisemitic feeling becoming ever more prominent, and adapting the Shema, the “Hear, O Israel” from the famous invocation in Deuteronomy 6:4 and Mark 12:29, to a different purpose. The Shema is a declaration of God’s unity, but I am trying to direct attention to the world’s increasing unity in marshaling its enmity and resources against the Jewish people.

FP: Why the hatred of the Jew?

Solway: As I write in the book, hatred of the Jew is the perpetual vestige of Western resentment and vexation against its own civilizing imperative. This too was Winston Churchill’s understanding of Jew-hatred, which he described as Western civilization’s revolt against its own central values as manifested in art, science and political and religious institutions. It is no exaggeration to say that the Jew is the test case of a civilization—a test we appear to have failed.

The spectacle we are observing today—the reluctance to deal adequately with terrorism, the political contriving against our own best interests, the serpentine efforts to exculpate the enemy, the relativizing of moral principle, the Left’s betrayal of its own liberal culture, the renewed “treason of the intellectuals,” and especially the mounting acerbity toward Jews in the court of public opinion and the isolation of Israel as a pariah state—is merely the modern instantiation of this long offensive against our very survival.

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The root of antisemitism is actually spiritual.

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