The world in which I came of age, learned to be a young woman, and entered my chosen academic field of philosophy, did not include provisions for people who hated Jews and wanted them dead.

Hitler lost the War – in the course of which my parents had brought over ten Jewish refugee families, securing sponsorship, papers and whatever they needed to restart their lives in God’s country. My mother had captured (i.e. uncovered and brought to the Feds’ attention) a Nazi spy ring operating out of the basement of our walkup apartment on 86th and Park. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had saved capitalism. 

In academic philosophy, where you published so as not to perish, I dealt only with topics that were for me inescapable. The relation of dialectic as a method to history at its situations limites or crisis points was for me one topic of that kind. My story as a woman raised urgent questions for which I did not see ready-made answers. Somewhat later, I needed to know how to understand evil – as an objective presence intruding into ordinary lives – the lives of people who hadn’t been looking for trouble.

Like the seventeenth-century’s “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,” twentieth-century philosophy had its quarrel between “the analysts and the continentals.” Since my master’s thesis had been on Frenchman Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and my dissertation on German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, normally I would’ve found my place among the continentals. But it didn’t work out quite that way. The continentals in the first department where I was employed had a striking tendency to cope with real-life situations by blowing clouds of polysyllabic smoke.  A girl had to notice that kind of thing.

Whereas the analysts … though I thought they cut the world into pieces smaller than its actual dimensions … at least made claims subject to refutation. They could be wrong! So I trusted them more and tended to chum with them.

Meanwhile, the hatred of Jews never became an issue for me. From time to time I had situations to puzzle out, where such a factor might hypothetically have provided an explanation. But it was one factor to consider. It wasn’t compulsory. My enemies had been multi-faith and cross-cultural – as were my friends.

To give you a sense of my personal experience prior to the present hour, I’ll cite highly-regarded analytic philosopher Daniel Dennett in I’ve Been Thinking, the memoir that’s providing my bedtime reading right now. In 1973, Dennett was driving to a conference in Connecticut and incidentally giving a ride to philosopher Hilary Putnam. On the ride, Putnam was telling Dennett about anti-semitic remarks made in his presence by Harvard philosophers who hadn’t realized that he was Jewish. 

Recollecting the incident, here’s what Dennett writes: “I have never encountered any anti-Semitism among the faculty or students at Harvard before or since, but I believed Hilary and I’ve been keeping a lookout for it.” The pub date is 2023. So it’s not that nobody was anti-semitic. But if they were, they kept it in the closet. They weren’t proud of it!

What would our world look like if we pictured it permanently immunized against the Once-and-Future-Oldest-Hatred? Let me give it a go. 

Our civilization would value itself, defend its best achievements and drop its present, preposterous pretense that “anything goes.” It would come to terms with its own deeply attractive excellence! From such a turn toward self-esteem and self-acceptance, it could set itself to regain the personal and cultural wholeness – moral, intellectual, spiritual, technological – that, for the last four-and-a-quarter centuries, modernity has sliced into separate and discrete shards.

One piece of cultural/personal wholeness that’s been missing is gratitude for the Jewish threads in the skein. As things stand now, our civilization’s self-rejection has been projected onto the Jews – and their small stretch of desperately-held ground – with a virulence fully explainable as self-hatred projected outward.

How else could it be so pitiless

and so passionate?

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