The Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power by Freedman Carl

Author:Freedman, Carl [Freedman, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781846949449
Publisher: NBN_Mobi_Kindle
Published: 2012-01-27T06:00:00+00:00

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But the matter is also a good deal more complicated than that. For what is at stake here is not just Nixon’s “toleration” of individual Jews but the whole complex relation between anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, and, indeed, the defining overall structure of ethnic or racial bigotry in general. In nearly every concrete variety of bigotry, the object of hatred is constructed in such a way as to include some features that, in and of themselves, could be regarded as favorable. They become unfavorable only in the total context of the bigot’s paranoia. In the case of anti-Semitism the ascribed Jewish feature most pertinent in this regard is nearly always intelligence. The stereotypes of anti-Semitism are wildly various and often self-contradictory—Jews have been represented as almost everything from tight-fisted misers to sexual predators, and they have been condemned with equal vigor for a clannish avoidance of Gentiles and for obnoxiously attempting to push their way, uninvited, into Gentile company— but, unlike such parallel cases as the Pole, the Irishman, or the African-American, the Jew has almost never (during Nixon’s lifetime or since) been constructed as stupid. To be sure, Jewish intelligence is not, for the anti-Semite, necessarily a redeeming trait. On the contrary, it may, especially in the more extreme versions of anti-Semitism, become part of the indictment itself. For it is typically understood as intelligence of an uncreative and hypercritical sort, an intelligence divorced from larger qualities of “character,” and an intelligence that is ultimately destructive in its aims. But the mythical intelligence of the Jew (like the equally mythical earthy vitality of the black or warm-hearted generosity of the Irishman) does function as a kind of switching-point that allows anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism to function not as simple opposites but in complex, dialectical collusion with one another. The notion that Jews are smart is an ideological stereotype just as much as the notion that Jews are miserly or disloyal; and individuals who harbor many sorts of anti-Semitic attitudes may nonetheless deliberately seek out Jews when, say, the expert skill of a surgeon, an attorney, or a stockbroker is wanted. In other words, anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism are not opposed answers to a particular logical question—as though we were rationally debating a political issue like whether to raise or lower the marginal income tax rates—but somewhat discordant components of the same, and ultimately anti-Semitic, ideology. “There is no anti-Semite who does not basically want to imitate his mental image of a Jew,” as the German (and Jewish) philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it in their ground-breaking essay, “Elements of Anti-Semitism.”

Did Nixon see himself as in some sense Jewish, as at least “a bit of a Jew,” in Sylvia Plath’s resonant phrase? Not long after he resigned the presidency, he offered the following analysis of his own career and character to his aide Kenneth Clawson:

What starts the process, really, are the laughs and snubs and slights you get when you are a kid. Sometimes it’s because you’re poor or Irish or Jewish or ugly or simply that you are skinny.

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