I grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (in the days before that got to be a swank neighborhood) and, aside from Mr. Z (our superintendent who turned out to be a Nazi spy), nobody – rich or poor or in the middle – thought Hitler was Mr. Nice Guy. Nobody believed there were two sides to that story. One side was evil, while the other side included the Allies who were about to win the War against Evil and save any surviving victims. The battle lines were clear and everybody knew where they were.

By the time incidents that betokened a different social reality began to occur, my formative years were behind me. In ordinary settings, I didn’t run into any nastiness about my being Jewish. It interested me – the fact that I was Jewish – but it was not socially problematic.

The dinner that Sydney University’s Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy gave for the guest speaker from Cambridge University’s Peterhouse may well have been my first such encounter in a respectable setting. At that dinner, which I’ve written about in a recent column, our guest singled me out for smiling, underhanded, unprovoked insult. I’ve already dealt with the unresolved question of how I should have handled it. Readers were divided about that. As was I.

Here I’ll add just one other observation. Think of the profound unmanliness – of Mister Peterhouse getting his jollies from abusing a woman! Not to mention a woman who was only there to honor him as the Department’s guest! What kind of a man does that? What must he feel about himself?

We pass on to a second incident, this one also in an academic setting. I was traveling solo to attend a University of Chicago conference on Emanuel Levinas. A French philosopher, a Jew who survived the Holocaust and, against that backdrop, worked out a philosophy concerned with the question of how human beings ought to relate to one another. Levinas is known for the emphasis he places on the human face. Your face is supposed to show that you’re a human being who deserves boundless respect. Atypically for philosophers, he argues that the Jewish approach sheds more light on this question of how people ought to view and treat each other than either the Christian or the secular approaches have done. 

Incidentally, Catherine Chalier, the closest disciple of Levinas, told me that gendarmes have had to be stationed in his Parisian lecture halls to prevent assassination attempts!

The conference was well attended. It included people from various walks of life who had discovered Levinas on their own, finding him insightful and helpful. Nothing wrong with any of that, save for the striking fact that the specifically Jewish character of Levinas’s thought was – save for a very few exceptions – not mentioned! Not by most panelists nor by people in the audience.

After one such panel, I approached the speaker who seemed to me to have gone farthest out of his way to evade the Jewish reality behind the thinking of Levinas. With some fervor, I spoke to him about its relevance to the topic that was discussed by the panel.

By way of response, and much to my astonishment, he told me that my face showed the character defects that accounted for my objections! Aside from the crudeness of his personal insult, it was a remarkable choice of insult, given the emphasis Levinas places on the vital importance of respecting the human face. 

Shaken and shocked by the encounter, I told the story to Catherine Chalier and I asked her this question: 

      “Do you think I did wrong to try to engage him in a face to face dialogue?”

     “No, it was not your fault,” replied Catherine Chalier. “It’s hatred, and it’s hopeless!”

Yes, probably hopeless. By now, I think of the incident as shocking above all because it took place between a man and a woman. What kind of a man insults a woman’s face – to her face?

The last of these incidents took place at a university in California. I was giving a talk critical of Hannah Arendt’s view that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust hadn’t shown enough resistance to their murderers. 

At the Q & A, the first question came from a dapper gentleman of middle years who was seated in the front row. Under the guise of being helpful, he explained that Jews had brought the Holocaust on themselves by controlling the banking industry! What is more, Mahler’s music justified the Holocaust because it was an insult to the German classical tradition!

Jerry, also seated in the front row, was wondering how in the world Abigail would respond to this!

I was wondering the same thing myself and, being a bit stunned, looked upward for Guidance. Then I spoke the words that came to me as I received them:

     “I denounce you from the floor to the ceiling! I won’t try to deal with what you said. These are not questions. They are Nazi canards!”

It was a moment devoid of ambiguity or double meanings.

It was evil:

pure, uncomplicated and unmixed. 

Of such a questioner, one no longer asks, what kind of man is that?

The eros of life, the desire – that animates most of us – for the realization of our purposes, had in this instance been traded in for motives quite different. Whatever subterranean source such motives came from, they failed to find a place among … 

the stories lived out

by the rest of us

in the time we have

to spend with one another.

Related Content: Tales of My Mother