How do you identify an anti-Semite? Or, a somewhat different question, does an anti-Semite know he or she is an anti-Semite? A unique point of modernity, at least American modernity, is that the reflex to see Jews as, foremost, Jews, and Jewishness as a disagreeable anomaly or eccentricity, and to hold on to the historical impulse to blame Jews for well… everything, seemed to all but disappear. The Jewish experience and the American experience became seamless. America was, finally, the promised land.
This transformation happened in an extraordinarily compact period, from the end of the Second World War when anti-Semitism was a prevalent social and cultural norm, to its sentiments being unutterable, if not gone, by the Seventies — coincidentally or not, concurrent with the rising dominance and might of Israel.
