Movable Snipe: Chick Rock, Chivalrous Hitch, Philo-Semites, and My New iPod

John,

I wonder what kind of music you listen to. Right now I'm listening to Kasey Chambers, one of these female folk troubadours I love— like Patti Griffith, Kathleen Finder (Canadian and thus overlooked) and the much-adulated Lucinda Williams. They're always caterwauling about the man that got away, the desolation of the passing scenery, the difficulty of telling the emotional truth in a strait-jacketed world: that kind of essentially adolescent angst, which I imagine leaves you unmoved.

I envision you listening to Schubert or someone equally upstanding. Or wait, perhaps it's Wagner you love—another, like Waugh, who didn't much like us "terrible Yids." Having just checked out Kesher Talk, where they are busy discussing Jewish Self-Hatred on the Right (as opposed to same on the Left, which is well-known and was recently exactingly and somewhat pedantically documented in that report the American Jewish Committee put out, which took the likes of Chomsky and Joel Kovel to task), I am feeling particularly Jabotinskyesque tonight.

First off, I was somewhat surprised to find that you, in all your proud conservatism, sound like such a proper British Lefty on the subject of Israel. Reminds me of the current incarnation of Hitchens, who has nothing good to say about his former opinions except for the qualms he continues to feel about the creation of a Jewish state, presumably because Israel—unlike any other country that has been created from scratch— exists on the non-justifiable basis of imperial occupation, of having taken land that wasn't completely unclaimed and there for the taking.

Unlike Zimbawe, say, or all of Europe for that matter. But I attribute his views on the subject of Israel to his having been under the charismatic and intellectually corrupting influence of Edward Said. I sat late into the night on the balcony of Hitchens' s room at the Plaza Athenee after the National Book Awards, trying to get him to reconsider his views both on Israel and Susan Sontag, whom he venerates in the way only an idol-smasher could venerate. The conversation was sparky and lubricated by I think two bottles of wine but there was no budging him. I will only add that he must be one of the few men left in the Western world with a chivalrous streak left in him; I can't remember the last time a man left his hotel room (replete with sleeping wife) to accompany me outside and see me into a cab.

But what I was really trying to get to, before being led astray (someone once told me that I live in parentheses) is that I don't buy your sleight-of-hand reasoning in defense of anti-Semitism. I didn't say I wanted Waugh booted out of the literary canon because of his fairly unrelenting Jew-bashing, the way Tom Paulin (now there's a real Jew-lover for you) thought Larkin should be banned from being taught in the schools because of his letters. Ditto for T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

No one's arguing that there's anything wrong with disliking Jews "in the generality", as you coyly put it—hell, most Jews would sign on to that agenda—but once you've said that, it seems to be a hop, skip and jump to writing off a historically sustained, single-mindedly murderous (and ultimately genocidal) animus towards a small group of people as an "expression of negativity."

I don't think there is a thinking Jewish person—other than those who are compulsive denigrators of their own tribe or who have moved to Greenwich and have managed to pass themselves off as faintly Hebraic of origin a long, long time ago— who doesn't feel the threat of anti-Semitism as something very much alive. And, finally, at least on this subject, I'm glad you consider yourself a philosemite and that you have a trail, both paper and pixel to prove it, but I often get the feeling that non-Jews declare themselves philosemites the better to mutter darkly about Jews without feeling guilty, as though the whole bunch of us were nothing more than troublesome and somewhat gauche relatives.

I am referring to your defense of Britain's atmosphere of "mild and genteel anti-Semitism" but essentially accommodating attitude toward their own Jews. What's so great about that? And why are Jews always supposed to be happy with crumbs? All in our insane wish to appease the feeling of envy we arouse in others, which you vaguely admit to suffering from yourself, covetously eyeing "zichrono livracha" (in the case of my—or any woman's—death, it would be zichrona livracha," you Samuel Johnson-quoting one-upper) and citing the lame punchline of some Cold War joke ("Darn Jews get the best of everything") as though it were a side-splitting observation. Since when has appeasement ever worked?

But here I've gone on at book-length and subverted the idea behind our blogging to begin with. I knew I wasn't meant for the iWorld. I'm sure James Wolcott would have something catty to say about this. Yglesias, on the other hand, seems blessedly free of the vituperative impulse that marks so much of the blogosphere. His is an equable spirit—unusual in one so young. I thought his analysis of why in some sense we could be said to have "won" the war in Iraq if one ignores the fact that it is an unwinnable war and thus a "hollow victory" was intriguingly put and blessedly free of insinuations about private (as in Cheney & Co.) oil interests having fueled the whole thing. I could warm up to him.

Less so Hit and Run, which seems to be composed of snippets of opaque interest—a little like bumper stickers—although some of the chat is above-average. When I dipped into Design Observer, I was mainly struck by how there are so many worlds within worlds out there, all of which have their own iconic figures and are impenetrable to outsiders. I read the essay on the disappointments of the latest design show at the Cooper-Hewitt with some interest, but then found myself lost in a sea of unrecognizable (to me) names of designers and projects. The only one I recognized was that of Chip Kidd—and that's only because he designs book jackets. It's probably even truer of the literary world, which exists in a self-inflated universe all its own, in spite of the fact that no one reads.

I would like to conclude by noting that my new iPod has arrived and my 17-year old daughter actually deigned to show me how to use it this evening, so there is hope for Luddites everywhere. Now I can listen to Kasey Chambers refusing to be rejected by a boyfriend as I sit on the crosstown bus. I've noticed, by the way, that the pitifully few comments that showed up about our exchange the last time I looked were either patronizing (instructing me in the uses of blogging) or snickering (pointing out that I had asked Michael to exchange the hideous photo of me for a slightly less unattractive one.)

You they seem to be more careful about/in awe of. But it's a masculinist world (I know there's no such term, but perhaps there should be, like the newly coined "weightist"), don't we masochistic feminist intellectuals all know it.

So good night, John. Don't let the bedbugs bite. Perhaps we'll meet someday somewhere, even though you say you never go anywhere and my daughter has me pegged as a loner. Sleep—or rather sleeping pills—awaits me, the better to unravel the something sleeve of my cares or however the phrase goes. I'm sure you have it at your fingertips.

Lehitraot and zei gezunt,

Daphne