Christopher Hitchens - [2007] - 'No Laughing Matter' with Martin Amis

yeah well ladies and gentlemen brothers and sisters comrades friends Shalom we didn't have a chair and I'm not gonna put myself as such someone has to start and it's gonna be Martin professor Amos will give you a an opening an opening burst about Saul Bellow on which I'll endeavor to comment and elaboration and then might be a bit of cross talk between us and then it'll be as it were your turn and I'll be in charge of that bit too and while you're thinking about it I say now all boring questions will be disallowed as will all speeches so while you're getting ready I've done audiences like you before believe bear that in mind if you would professor good evening I hope you can all hear me it's meant to be about saw but we're gonna as Christopher was saying beforehand he fans out you know like a like a galaxy and we'll come back to him I went to Israel with him in fact for a Saul Bellow conference and he I went with him to the first session and he said after 10 minutes if I have to listen to any more of this and there were things like you know the encaged cash register existentialism in early saw Bella he said if I have to listen to another word and it's like I think I'm gonna die he said so we we're gonna talk about Israel - via his book to Jerusalem and back and of course his lifelong concern and anxiety about is about Israel the phrase anti-semitism was coined in the 1870s by a German journalist called Wilhelm ah whose noble intention it was to get people to stop hating Jews for religious reasons and start aiding them the cultural and racial reasons Saul used to say that I said to him Norman Cohn in his book war for genocide about the protocols of the Elders of Zion said that anti-semitism was a neurosis and Saul said no it's a psychosis and I hope we'll we'll talk about that because it's very right but present I feel here in England you know a certain kind of beyond pants on here is you know never more gorgeously a disease never more exquisitely complacent than when attacking Israel and trying to do legitimize Israel so I hope we'll talk more about what what anti-semitism is but I'm gonna cheer you up by talking about Philo Semitism the words see Mike and semitism remains problematic but Philo we all know what that means love off I am a Philo's you might and I will give you a little how-to course on what you have to do to create an ad you see my ad pilot seem like a big advance it's no problem creating anti-semite first you have him born into a boho kind of family rough-and-ready family where the father in fact is mildly anti-semitic I remember when I was like 13 one of our we have many close family friends who are Jewish Thea Richmond was among them we were playing Scrabble my father and me and Thea and my father didn't actually put down the tiles but he he suggested the word year and at 30 and I didn't fully understand what that meant but I knew I didn't like it and later on I had the privilege of being able to say to him dad what's it like being mildly anti-semitic and he said well it's very mild as you say you know he said yeah you're watching some innovatory new TV program and then when the credits come up you find yourself ok there's another one there's another one although you would have been horrified by actively horrified by any actual stuff and was actually pro-israel on the other hand my mother was a woman of Universal equanimity so much so that when at the age of nine as a resident of Princeton New Jersey I asked a black American friend Marty at school I said do you want to come back to my house for tea and he said I prefer coffee and I said yeah it's it's actually not tiered it's a sort of meal and he said with cakes and he said he said now I said your mother won't like me because I'm black and I said with full conviction my mother won't even notice that you are black so that kind of background helps then this is perhaps a bit more testing you've got to supply them with at the age of 17 with a beautiful Jewish girlfriend and preferably in the year 1967 during the June war where she is rushing off to give blood for the for the Jews her mother was secretary to Lord Seif her grandmother was so it was great very sweet and I wish I'd talked more to it so observant that in her pantry even the instant coffee was kosher go blend instant coffee so give her the first love with a beautiful Jewish girl then then later on he'll have his oldest and closest friend Christopher discover movingly in the end I think 1989 that he was in fact Jewish and that's I thought that's why I loved him wasn't for his qualities because he was the Jew I can't make this completely chronological but by that time I was not only completely in love with the novels of Saul Bellow but beginning to be a good friend of his to the man who emancipated the Jews the into into the American artistic mainstream I think that's one of his incidental achievements and to show perhaps a deeper kind of interest and sympathy you write your novels what your novels come from you finally decide is from things you you're worrying about and don't know worrying about silence anxiety and I was moved over the years to write a novel about the Holocaust and more recently a novel about the auntie's the Holocaust that never happened which was the starlet's Holocaust that was all set to go in 1953 the Jewish doctors were going to be hanged on Red Square and then the Jews 2 and 1/2 million of them I think were to be to run the gauntlet to be Robbie jam on the Chinese border where according to sergeant it's embarrassing built for them and it didn't happen because Stalin died it would have happened then finally you've got to provide me with a Jewish wife my wife Isabel Fonseca and two jewish daughters who there any quarter jewish but by Jewish law 100% and they are Jews who will themselves be the mothers of Jews we have many names for them in our house they're seven and ten they're called the flowers the fools the poems the rats but I often sub vocalize them as the Jews where are the Jews it shouldn't the Jews be home by now we're always just it was lousy juice and it's great importance to me and I can't really explain it but it makes me feel closer to history in a way that I very much value Niagara read before we widen out again I had to read a bit the ending of a Saul Bellow short story called the old system this is not about Israel this is about assimilated Jews in America and in this story dr. Brown is throughout this long ish story he's very anxious to see his his sister who's dying in hospital Tina and she says they've had a flood for many years and she says she will see him on her deathbed if he gives her $30,000 because she feels she was stiffed on an earlier property deal but then he goes he goes he's finally allowed in and she's all the documents are there and he's supposed to give her the money in and she sweeps it all away and the the ring her mother's ring which has been much debate about is produced the ring she had taken from Aunt Rose was tied to Tina's wasted finger she's dying do you know but then it was tied to Tina's wasted finger with dental flowers she held out her hand to the nurse the nurse cut the thread Tina's said to Isaac not the money I don't want it you take Mama's ring and dr. Brown bitterly moved tried to grasp what emotions were what good were they what were they for and no one wanted them now that's the cold I was better on life on death but again the cold of the I would be proportional to the degree of heat within but once humankind had grasped its own idea that it was human and human through such passions it began to exploit to play to disturb for the sake of exciting disturbance to make an uproar a crude circus of feelings so the Browns wept for Tina's death Isaac held his mother's ring in his hand dr. Brown too had tears in his eyes oh these Jews these Jews their feelings their hearts dr. Brown often wanted nothing more than to stop all this for what came of it one after another you gave over your dying one by one they went you went childhood family friendship love love was stifled in the grave and these tears when he wept them from the heart you felt you justified something understood something but what did you understand again nothing it was only an intimation of understanding I promised that mankind might eventually through its gift which might might again be a divine gift comprehend why it lived why life why death and again why these particular forms these Isaac's and these Tina's when dr. Brown closed his eyes he saw red on black something like molecular processes the only true her artery of being as later in the clothes black darkness when the short day ended he went to the dark kitchen window to have a look at stars these things cast outward by a great forgetting spasm billions of years ago now is it I my views on Israel my feelings impressions about Israel just those feelings and impressions and for political analysis we will depend on the hitch but it does seem to me that has there ever been a state in history that is so dependent on emotion 12 years after the War of Independence ye Gaia yeah Dean asked when the victory had where the victory had come from he said it had come from Israel's youth it appears as if that youth absorbed into itself the full measure of Israel's yearning during the thousands of years of Exile to return to its soil and to live in liberty and independence and like a giant spring which had been compressed and held down for a long time to the utmost measure of its compressibility when suddenly released it liberated and just a couple of short lines from from sourcebook about Jerusalem which I think sometimes criticized for not noticing the existence of any non-jewish Israelis but I think a book that now seems very prescient and full of a very eloquent anxiety I sometimes think there were two Israel's the real one is territorially insignificant in fact one-sixth of one percent of Arab lands the other the mental Israel is immense a country inestimable a important playing a major role in the world as broad as all history and perhaps as deep as sleep what you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state you can't take your right to live for granted others can you cannot this is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and we're under a decent regime no it means only that the Jews because they are Jews have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right to be sure many Israelis refused to admit that this historic uneasiness has not been eliminated they seem to think of themselves as a fixed power immovable their point has been made they are a nation among nations and will always remain so you must tear your mind away from this conviction as you must tear it from civilized appearances in order to reach reality search for relief from the uneasiness is what is real in Israel nationalism has no comparable reality to say as George Steiner says that Zionism was created by Jewish national who drew their inspiration from Bismarck and followed a Prussian model can't be right the Jews did not become nationalistic because they drew strength from their worship of anything resembling Germanic blood tuned Ison but because they alone amongst the peoples of the earth had not established a natural right to exist unquestioned in the lands of their birth this right is still clearly not granted them not even in the liberal West at the same time Jews are called upon and called upon themselves to be more just and more moral than others and just wind up and pass this on to Christopher Ben our honoree levy wrote a piece in The New York Times Magazine this last summer saying that when when these twirling rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah land in Israel of course they're the focus of intense anxiety but that anxiety is also forward-looking in that in 10 20 years they will be far more sophisticated rockets with different kinds of warheads and think you feel sometimes that the crisis that the world is in at the moment is a crisis of mere weaponry or pure weaponry the weaponization of war grievance and how long can Israel born in war and nurtured by siege as Abba Eban put it how long did it live this life of intense anxiety and this has been a summer full of portents and and it was in the pensive setting of Las Vegas in the summer that Krista and I admitted to a new order of anxiety about the future of Israel well I suppose I also should feel like I owe you a statement of my own position on one or two things I I'm committed for the exact opposite end I think from the one that Martin began with for most of my life I've thought of the only principle worth upholding worth defending with advocating witnessing for was that of socialist internationalism to which of course the Jewish people have been perhaps the major contributors that anything else was ignoble or sectarian that Zionism was potentially a bourgeois nationalist trap for the ancient Jewish people that Judaism was to be objected to not just in itself as a religion but on even more strong grounds offered by Voltaire that Judaism has the terrible tendency to lead to Christianity and if you can't dislike it for that you don't know what it is to feel hatred and suspicion but never able to escape from the fact that well while I was unwilling to say anything under this heading for myself except that as I already discovered some of my worst enemies were Jews that anyone who defamed or threatened the Jewish people was defaming and threatening my mother my grandmother my wife and my daughter I therefore felt it wasn't really necessary speak about this in mind in my own behalf I still regard Israel not as the answer to the Diaspora as an alternative to the gospel but has a large part of the Jewish Jasper I was asked a very intelligent question by a lady from Jewish Chronicle earlier this week but whether I would feel unease there being Jewish if I came back to England and I said well well she correctly reported that many Jews do you feel currently agreat on the I so I don't ever expect or actually want to feel at ease and I don't think it's in the face or nature of the Jewish people to feel at ease or at home I think that we are doomed to exile and doomed to diaspora don't want us to become as a were complacent there's a wonderful expression in victor klemper 'as diaries of the Third Reich which I hope every one years read or will read or is reading where he says in conversation with a comrade as the net tightens around him we are a seismic people we can always see what's coming we always know in advance whether what the tremors are going to be we register the tremors we will never change it'll always be insecure and not say what I think that's right I don't want it to be different don't want a quiet life also don't expect one what drew me to the Jewish tradition that Ida liked when I was so Marxist I still Alan Marx was burned along with socialism was some of you talmadeus will get this I think was not just the fantastic contribution of the modernity of Marx and Freud and Einstein and Kafka and Billy Wilder but the innate tendency to fracture site and disputation and dialectic that was we found among it among classes it were and the and the feeling always wherever you were you would always be an exile okay fine by me I don't I don't repudiate this in fact I welcome it I could go on about this a lot I will actually succeeded that can't often do this with margin I've been surprising him a few nights ago I can't offer the surprising that's to say on any literary matter I said the Theodor Herzl was the only person who'd ever written a utopian novel that as it were come true you know but out Noland very bad novel in many ways but the only novel ever about a future society that could be said to be the blueprint of an actually existing state the idea that Israel is and the Jewish project is a written one is a work-in-progress subject to revision a literary project of course magnetizes me fascinates me believe me I could go on a lot about this below I feel I should say why I think Saul Bellow is a great help in decoding some of it and I think it's principally a literary question when when Henry James started to try and define the idea of an English literature written by Americans or in America in the American scene the thing that most horrified him when he returned to the New York that he thought belonged to him was the prevalence of Yiddish Kyte as he called it that the murder of the English language in the torture rooms of the Jewish coffee houses and clubs and brass you couldn't believe that the pure well of English had been so defiled by these these the aliens of Israel as he would call them and for a very long time this was this was a regnant feeling feeling was a regular policy in the American Academy I'm sure as many of you know Lionel trilling was one point refused tenure at Columbia University on the ground so there's a Marxist a Freudian and a Jew and they might as well just have come right out with it he wouldn't be able to understand especially sensitive register of English literature couldn't let alone teach it to others and nobody thought that was an embarrassing reason for not giving him the job so it's to me incredibly important I don't think in Bella's mind it was a conscious revenge but it can't have been other than latent in his mind that with the publication especially of Augie March that the verse whose parents and grandparents spoke Yiddish and came to America has despised immigrants often illegal as in the case of the Bella family as you know perhaps Sol didn't realize he wasn't an American till he went to join the United States Army in 1941 it was told you're not on the books your parents that were illegal immigrants from Canada you have to go back and become a citizen and then you can apply to join our army and that's part of the background of dangling man never being sure of a place that she suddenly finds that he's witnessed for literature in English written in a supple and marvelous way that the admirers of Henry James have no alternative but to praise and to respect which artist we've Travis this goes also of course for Norman Mailer for Philip Roth for Joseph Heller who's often left out of this account I think wrongly and others too but I think it's especially significant contribution of the man Saul Bellow who translated the love song of jail Fred Prufrock into Yiddish you try it who with Irving howl and other members of the descent magazine and partisan review group discovered the wonderful treasure house of the work of Isaac Bashevis singer if it's you really only available to those who could buy the Jewish daily forward and religion Indian dish and to make people aware of what an extraordinary presence there already was of this kind on American soil I regard that really as his most signal contribution there were those who said that this wasn't really English this was a sort of dialect in fact even Martin in an early piece on them bellow referred to his occasional lapse into low life patois which when I quoted in my book of essays is rendered in the worst and yet best misprint that I've ever had inflicted on me by now lowlife patios the sort of place where American literature is considered towards sundown but there it is nobody nobody doesn't talk now with some acknowledgement not just of CAFTA and so but as it were of Woody Allen and I guess I should add that's what I always liked again about the Jewish tradition even reading the to me hateful Maimonides it's remarkable when he says in guide to the perplexed well is it necessary to believe that the Messiah will come yes it is necessary to believe that the Messiah will come then he adds though he may tarry now you don't get that shrug in any other monotheism I'm telling you now and you can read Woody Allen out of minorities if you want to everyone knows what I'm talking about I think it was ghetto in no bold all this in an extraordinary way but it's not politically without problem it was said of cow Moos la peste that it doesn't mention any Arabs just as it's been said of Parros Jerusalem it seemed to me that I've read mr. Sam is planet before I read which is Jerusalem and back and I began to recognize in that and some other fellows writings a sort of allegory of something very disquieting that was emerging in America in the 60s and 70s which was a rivalry between Jewish Americans and black Americans especially in New York and in Chicago elsewhere to look particularly there and that the the sense of threat that some Jews were beginning to feel in the school boards and districts diversion Hills in Brownsville in Brooklyn and in the south side of Chicago was in a sense replicated through the experience of Teddy Kollek by Ed Koch if you're following me about this I can elaborate if you like in a kind of allegory of a black Jewish rivalry which were bellow very much which of which he was I think it could be easily said the specially sensitive register but I thought I saw something possibly menacing to both parties occurring here I thought it needed to be analyzed it became it's even more clarified in them because this tendency among Jewish Americans acquired the name of neoconservatism at a very early stage when I think it was known podhoretz pointed out with his customary grace and tact that American Jews had the this is how he put it the income pattern of Episcopalians and the voting pattern of Puerto Ricans I think you can tell the sort of turn of voices involved now it's refined by Bello in his book Ravel C which Martin has never forgiven me for reviewing as if it was in some sense a nonfiction book as if it was the the jet he promised to pay to Allan bloom of a memoir in novelistic form but in there as you some of you will know there is a figure very recognizable as paul wolfowitz and there's a school very recognizable as the famous Chicago School on Committee on social thought would chaired by Nathan choco friend of mine old friend of barrows and Leo Strauss is and Allan blooms and Paul Wolfowitz is and in there it is it is said that the greatest shame of the United States and the recent past is its failure to put an end to the violation of saddam hussein in 1991 the knows their subsequent failure has been as shameful as that as well as many of us believe so that though one must i think at all times resist the politicization of literary criticism the remarkable thing to me about Saul there it was the way which he accepted the challenge of the political critique I think I probably said enough on that heading now yeah he said once I don't think he's ever said this in print but he's so that I what said privately said without Israel Jewish manhood would be finished he said I don't think you meant Jewish men immense Jewish self-respect but it was a sort of atavistic way of putting it he was he felt that this idea that the Jews we're gonna bring it about that the Jews cannot be put to death as he put it is institutionalized in a state and and he was I think he was he he was beginning to have cerebral difficulties about the year 2000 quite a long time before he died and when September the 11th happened he didn't take it in he didn't really take it in amazingly because he was just a month before I had seen him for several days and he seemed you know drifting in and out a bit short term memory a bit but totally coffers meant as pubs and I met a 90 year old lady in New York who's still coming into the office every day as we speak yet who couldn't take in that event and didn't really try to take in that event and it's as if you he one of his unfinished books was called all marbles still accounted for but when the marbles are perhaps under threat there's a certain size of event you can't assimilate and I think he knew that he sense not only that this was an enormous event but it was a an enormous event that would redound somehow on israel and during last summer when when these these unpleasant port portents for israel were emerging there was a great efference of anti-semitism here if you remember those middle class whities waddling around placard saying we were all head spotter now well enjoy while you can because house and as Rallo wants to kill you he knew that this perhaps was going to be a defeat for Israel and I'd like to ask crystal about this the rise the rise of Islamism which by the way we know the Muslim Brotherhood Brotherhood got started in the 1920s in Egypt and been brewing for a long while before but it crystallized with site YouTube in his ridiculous and ridiculously influential book milestones which was conceived and written suspiciously soon after the formation of the State of Israel on his journey to America in 1949 that the rise of Islamism also the with the Iraq war and other events the depletion of American power in the Middle East this this perhaps is will be the main consequence of the Iraq war that the period of Pax Americana of American domination in the Middle East and again I'm not easy about all this but which began in 1989 or 1990 one depending on when you date the death of the Soviet Union that this period is coming to an end and the regional players are stepping forward and perhaps even that American power itself is nearer to eclipse or partial effects and this is not good news for Israel the worst disagreement I had in person with Silveira was about a friend of mine Edward say the co-author of mine well actually that's putting the best rating myself too high I committed to the book with him at that point Edward Saeed was a from a Christian family and was an atheist and didn't have a racist nerve in his whole a ganglion but the it was a just a clash as it were between two kinds of nationalism in Palestine and I would have said at that point that there had been overreacting hadn't been understanding enough about what the Jabotinsky revisionist for designers and had done on the West Bank and in Gaza wasn't willing to concede enough of that partly because of indeed you're quite right about the Mount Hood question very very many American Jews felt that they could look anyone in the eye after 967 the reputation of of Jews as being unmilitary cowardly the left mensch as well so he's the core it was gone a slight element of hubris there I thought I also thought that I had been overreacting to what had happened in Chicago during a brief period of black power in the city's politics when a particularly decorative figure in in mayor Harold Washington's administration had publicly accused Jewish doctors of killing the AIDS virus to black babies I said we're now looking it's a hill case a nut case these are sordid idiot and so forth but you know don't get this isn't this is not the face of black America don't don't become to podhoretz like about it well look how am I supposed to talk now allegations like this a common place they're pumped out in in mosques only a few hundred feet from here they're taught to children by people who have subsidies from the British thing it's it's actually impossible I think to underestimate the way in which the vilest kinds of anti-semitism have reproduced in an Islamist not a nationalist form in a religious form the only thing I can ever think of to cheer myself up is that these fools have to borrow the the crummiest sorts of Russian Christian Orthodox fabrication I refuse to call the protocols of the Elders of Zion of forgery as they accommodate all they're not a forgery is an attempt to copy a true bill there's no true bill behind the protocols it's a flat-out fabrication okay perhaps it's nice that Hamas can only think of putting that on its website they don't have a tradition of Jew hatred quite of their own but yes they do and it's in their holy book the one that they say is the last word that God ever spoke so in that darkness in their charter it's impossible to overstate this country now I now I wish I as Martin must for many other reasons too I wish I could have my conversation with with better back again wish I could refine it a bit wish I could have made my own points a little sharper and more and more sophisticated because this is a this is a very very serious cultural danger and it's only a fool who thinks that anti-semitism is the threat to Jews and anti-semitism is is a very very toxic threat to everything we can decently call civilization and it confers upon us when we find it even a little bit because it's quite hard to be mildness as good I like I like it there's quite generally quite hard to be a little bit anti-semitic and I should just end when you wet way started about the psychosis of course Steve country was a psycho he couldn't stay off the subject of the Jews most people who have this prejudice can't stay off it that's the thing if someone says they don't like West Indians because of their I don't know what it might be their music well they don't like Indians because of the smell of their cooking or they don't like Koreans for the kimchi or whatever it might be everyone every minority emergent majority of the world has a version of this kind of prejudice but as Freud pointed out they'll all sink their differences when it comes to the Jews and with the Jews it's not their cooking or their sex lives or any of this it's and it's not just vulgar prejudice about skin color or smell any of this it's a it's a theory it's a paranoid theory that tries to explain quite a lot it's fascinated with gold with secret documents with missing codicils in ancient treaties with the idea of an invisible and secret government it's a it's a very very very dangerous pseudo intellectual prejudice indeed and I think that it was absolutely right to be seismic about it and if the cost of that was sometimes exaggerating it or maybe even conceivably once or twice eing it when it wasn't there I now think that's a very small price to pay compared to the risks of being insensitive to it and it's of the dangers that it poses and I that's why I don't apologize for taking such a long time to make this point we might just talk a little bit more about what anti-semitism is you've described it as paranoia and it is it's it belongs with the sort of the conspiracy theory and and there's a marvelous quote from Hitler saying that in the Frankfurter Zeitung zeitoun there was a ringing refuge exposure of the protocols of the Elders of Zion as being a fabrication nor fortress he would have said this alone proves that it is genuine where do you begin it's it's not quite a neurosis it's not quite as a psychosis the vasily grossman in life and faith suggests that it's that anti-semitism is it's like a vast mirror and it's it's an ocean of insecurities that you know the cruising insecurities in in the common minds for some reason gravitate towards the Jew as the explanation of and reason for all frustrations you know and as you said and many other people have said it's the the central paradox of it is that you hate the Jews and you think they're insects and all the usual stuff but you also suspect they're running your life and they're both you know contemptible and all-powerful nobody thinks that West Indians are trying to take over Wall Street for itself I say nothing I don't have no one thinks I'm making joke at the expense of Jamaicans when I say that it's just not alleged people who hate them don't say they're trying to take over the international financial system I think we think my grandmother his origins were in what is now Russia Wolford was there in Breslau had a very simple exhibitionist come on darling there is chilies well go ahead of course can be as joyous as they like but it's actually it's the protium nature of it that gets me if they can't get the Jews for being behind International Finance capital it'll be because they're behind international communism it's got to be one or the other but often both and as the crew of the Crusaders long before they got anywhere near Palestine had burned out every ghetto they came across and blamed the Jews for the Black Plague and poisoning the wells and so forth and it anything you like the depressing thought about this being that was something in a radical in a radical book about it my view as a determined atheist is that there's something else that's often not mentioned out of politeness which is the following there have been living several false prophets including several Jewish false messiahs as you know but there are two very well-known false prophets in the shape of Jesus and Muhammad who have tremendous number of sympathizers the only two thing the only thing these two false prophets and demagogues have in common is this they first introduced themselves to the local Jewish population saying they were going to vindicate their prophecies and after the Jews that had asked where look at both of them they said no now they took with my more ideas view the Messiah still terry's there isn't a Christian or a Muslim in the world or in the history of the world who wouldn't have given in theory everything they had for a little face time of Jesus of Nazareth or with the Prophet Muhammad and the only people who did meet these two imposters saw through them right away you think this is going to be forgiven you're wrong but take pride in it the Jewish people's achievements have almost all taken place since the time of Jewish emancipation from religion since the dual emancipation from the ghetto imposed on them by dissent lights and since they're only Mansa patient into secularism the world of Einstein Freud Marx Kafka and the rest of the first people the people who laid the curse of monotheism on the human race in the first place were the first ones to repudiate it and all of their glories have taken place in that secular diaspora well that's what I think and and there's no health outside that there's no redemption but following prophecies looking for holy places or holy sites as oh no no no that's a waste of Jewishness a complete waste of Jewishness to try that and it will involve you in committing injustice against others and we are rightly forbidden rightly forbidden to do that it probably can't be I'll throw it over a minute you will hitch it probably can't be in eradicating because you know the phenomenon of anti-semitism without Jews there are places with no Jews at all anti-semitism thrives so it does seem to be like several other regrettable human traits just a part of being human and it is big war part but apart so well you know at that point I think it's possible the witched as you are the insufferable complacency of these two young English golden boys quasi symmetric claims I can't actually see anybody properly and I don't know if there's a roving mic or not I'm just gonna trust you why doesn't someone ask an amusing or intelligent question is there a mic is there something that ma'am just before we take the first question mr. Hitchens if I could just ask Peter levy to say a few words he should have done it at the beginning we overlooked him you wanted to you wanna step on my well no thank you hi um I've got first of all I just like to say it's really really wonderful to see you both here and feel really honored this is I mean this isn't a hundred percent a question about Judaism at all but um in your wonderful book experience you say that the mother of your first daughter was manic-depressive and I just wonder whether because that's also genetic partly and I wonder whether you um have interest in it or in in manic depression yeah that's a Woody Allen question and I think it's um it's it's a absolutely tragic condition but and funnily enough one of its symptoms is anti-semitism it is another of its symptoms is ordering grand piano and Rolls Royces and I had a friend whose husband was mag depressive and she went to the hospital went to the doctor and he said what's he doing that she said Rolls Royces and he said well it'll be grand pianos next she drove home and there's a grand piano being winch in the back I think it's a it's it's a it's a it's it's very humiliating when you start following a kind of schedule of ridiculous behavior reinforcing the view that the insanity is is it's not as if you're gonna do it anything you're gonna be doing these specific things and nothing seems to be more important than than not doing what other people do not being part of an ideology not being part of a crowd this seems you know more and more urgent to me not using the the kind of language that everyone else is using the no-brainer and went pear-shaped and don't do that but you reveal your little cultural level so starkly when you use these phrases that are that skimming around these hey already aging novelty is that you know some people their whole the cavalry consists have seen it done it had a banana that's a real human nation you've got a stress the power of the individual and of course that's what manic depression like many other things completely strips you off in one of Martin's father's Knowles there's a very arresting and haunting description of someone his mind is becoming unraveled and unfailing predictive sign of that and I've seen it myself in many cases is the feeling of that you Jewish persecution all the feeding the Jews are pervasive and everywhere and any anyone who's professionally involved in this phenomenon will tell you the same it's certain another universal concern of the manic-depressive is electricity they're always leaning into the light bulb to get some message beamed down from them from another world but extraordinary that in this pentagram Mick Jagger's and other elements in this you always think he's trying to be you or you're trying to be him Jews electricity Mick Jagger and you know what could be more humiliated by good company in the right way but but the fact that the the Jews of a wired in even to this well mapped and miserably predictable psychosis is I think you know almost a poetic system but also again showing us that it is it is a universal and eternal this this terrible recourse in the human mind do I see another hand in the background there we are hello you said that anti-semitism is an obsession with people who feel it but it's also an obsession with fear of it and analysis of it is also an obsession with Jews do you think that Jews should try and avoid identifying themselves through these negative means and if so how I'm not sure I understand the grammar of the question to be honest with you I understand the meaning of what what negative identifications are you very mind i identifying as jews through feeling fearful of anti-semitism I just taped myself and my mother wanted to pass which is so perfect right to do as many many Jewish people have especially in England where it's relatively easy she didn't want her firstborn son to be given any bother for being the son of a Jewish woman and in fact she wanted me to be English gentle and you be the judge of her well that work done and that's that's perfectly okay but my view is my my conclusion from finding out what happened to her and what she wanted and what she got is that in no tone of voice if the question was asked to me are you Jewish would I would I say no and I can't imagine what would make me change my mind about that it's not a matter of going around affirming yes wearing a Star of David or anything was so my name just uh I would never say no if I was an ass I think that's too much to ask you I think quite a wait why do you think of anyone any other minority in the world that has this question in this mind making the point that Saul Bellow is making or Martin was ventured up rising from soul holy SH people don't have this problem English people by definition don't have this problem slow backs don't have as well Jews do why the hell is that keep a low profile and not earning any any money and not make any contribution to the arts or these stay away from nuclear physics above all yeah and psychiatry it's it's actually sad and this is an extraordinary thought that the great fluorescence of irrationality around the early decades of the last century was a reaction to the weirdness of science you know Hitler and Lenin and Stalin would never use the word reason without putting some insulting adjectives in front of it like cowardly or miserable or abject not because Jewish science had shown shown the essential weirdness of many things about the human condition Einstein showed the weirdness of space Freud the weirdness of human psychology and that caused the revolt against reason absolutely sorry there's reminding me something that I used to be friendly with Jacobo Timerman who some of you will have I hope heard over maybe read his book about being the editor of la opinión the best paper in Buenos Aires when the fascist dictatorship took over Argentina in the 70s and he was some disappeared as they used to say not to be a desaparecidos and when he gave an account it's a wonderful book if you haven't read it prisoner without a name cell without a number he gave an account of the way in which he was tortured not just the methods but I mean the the questioning and they his fascist Georgia said you know we know what it is to be a Jew send your Timmerman you who came to be an Argentine said you've ruined our entire lives it's in your your Einstein has ruined Christian cosmology and replaced it with chaos and speculation we used to know how the heavens were to know we spoiled all that your dr. Freud has ruined our family values and our certainties about the decencies the organic Christian family and your dr. Marx has made a Christian economics impossible this is between blows of the cattle prod they're getting they're getting the point they're getting there in their primitive way it was actually quite an insightful thing for them to say as it is for Christians and Muslims to never forgive the fact that Jewish people were the first to see through their false claims of prophecy be proud of this I would I am Comrie bring it on Martin I wondered if you could share with us the most amusing insightful moment that you shared with and he'll give it some welly okay I wondered Martin if he could share with us the most amusing and insightful moment that you shared with Saul Bellow please Spencer and I had to say bring it on didn't I well I will do this briefly and and tenderly but I took her to meet saw in Vermont song his wife Janice and we had a very nice drive from Cape Cod to Vermont buddy movie but even the radio on then we got there and I said on the way I said no sinister balls that kick which is our code for you know the yeah making everything suddenly very steely and political and he said I am and then when it was four ooh streak of parachute about about Israel and it was it was I mean I I can't understand why they didn't hit it off immediately because they're both both Jews both extracts both rebels above all but it was one of those antimatter meets matter and then as we were sitting over the ruins of the the evening I'm sorry and hitch had been defending Edward side he said admittedly so-called the terrorists if I know means you know one sided and then that but not nonetheless like Paul over the the end of their dinner and and Christopher said well I'm sorry if I went on a bit but every side is a friend of mine and and if I hadn't defended him I would have felt bad and then there was a silence and Saul said how do you feel now I've I've never had a chance before to so it's settled out hope you've got a drink and everything this may take me some time I'll make it Ches you should read Martin's account of this in his wonderful the more experience which I hope is pile high outside the room as well as that fine bookstores everywhere it's the it's the most rational and experience of my life as I read his account of an event I realize it's exactly true and exactly true as he recalls it to couldn't fault it except for one tiny thing which was that wrong cigarette when he said look dare depress him with particles eyes they were worried but I won't do that but I knew he was a very political Mandal was happy used to be one of the urges of new politics used to be very involved in the choice was moving the song we have a few handles when we arrived you've forgotten this but I thought I did you credit he said to some he was reminiscing about the time he was hired by Time magazine as a book critic as a young young man he thought I've got a job they're paying me to review books he arrived at Time magazine he was told have you on his first day well have you had your interview of Whittaker Chambers yet then the boss of time said didn't know we needed a meeting with mr. Cheney yes you do he'll take place at three o'clock this afternoon went into the office toad-like figure of chambers sitting behind the desk mr. Barrow take a seat tell me what was your course of study of the University there I said I studied English literature chamber said very good the queen of subjects give me your view if you would mr. bellar William Wordsworth as a poet that I said I don't dissent from the prevailing view he was a romantic coach chambers said there is no place for you in this organization you must be out of the office by close of business this afternoon tell the story which you can read in a fictional version in victim mr. Ruettiger does this to better and he told us this story brilliantly and we were sitting there and he said he'd had and I realized I had similar as they had the same few thoughts he wondered what if he'd kept the job he might have been remembered as the book critic for Time magazine a horrifying thought and then the second question also have occurred to me I was determined to do my best for Mart what should I have said and I said I'd already got there I said well you should have said William Wordsworth was a former Revolutionary Republican poet who saw the error of his ways and became a conservative in demonicus that would have captured and Barrow said you know what that subs that's obviously right that's what he was hoping I would say I thought I'd done a bit of credit for well I'm this plane just but but as Chekhov says when there's a great revolver on the mantelpiece in the first act it'll be fired by act 3 and the and the owned in this the house of this consummate illiterate man and the all his books on where we were sitting all the lowlife partiers are outside having a drink there was only one thing to read on view and it was commentary magazine and the cover story read Edward Saeed professor of terror and I knew we were probably going to have to go through something but what was I to do if I didn't defend my pal when Martin was there how was Martin gonna know I wouldn't defend him when he wasn't picture if you will it's just to wind it up I've rang the next day and I said I you know so sorry I didn't work out and Chris we went on it and saw that my he said he he was never anything but totally sweet to me then he said he said I get that all the time and I said that's what the H said why he gets it on it so we've been through a lot of severe Chow mudak and trotskyists and the old of sectarian arguments he like that kind of thing was one of the it I also think he made tremendous use of it in his fiction in a very on dog magic way he thought that was always available to and accessible to him the arguments that on tiny points that have to take place wherever there's more than one Jew speaking well I'm interested in a really brief question should Jews criticize Israel if they really think it's taken a wrong path or do you think they should shut up and close ranks safe in the knowledge that they'll always be someone else will do it no I think they should look there's that's it yeah I just want to step on any of your line there is there is a very old as you know Jewish anti Zionist tradition I mean and we used the only anti-zionists used to be Judaism the Muslim world didn't know there was an argument going on between Herzl and others the Christian world barely cared and many Christians thought well if they insist on going to Palestine we certainly wish they would go somewhere else Madagascar would be fine Uganda so on there was a there was a feeling why that's why after Balfour was the greater enemy of Jewish immigration to Britain was Makena stones and so on and so on but it was an old Jewish critique that said this is not going to come to any good you only replaced the question of anti-semitism if you move it to Palestine and you made you an injustice to the existing inhabitants there and it's messianic which can't lead to anything but grief and I have a great sympathy for the founders of that argument back to Abram Leon in Brussels and many many others I think that they were quite prescient it only replaces that it hasn't made you safer it hasn't made them more popular it isn't the alternative to be asked for because of every Jew in the world was to move to Palestine the state would have to be at least twice the size it currently is and I can imagine quite a lot of argument about that really quite a lot of I mean it wouldn't just be from people who don't like Jews some people have to move on so and as I say I think as well as part of the Diaspora not a not an answer to or an alternative to it so that's the first overarching point the second is that I don't think take part in the argument about Israeli policy less vigorously than Israelis do now there's absolutely nothing unpublishable on this point in the Israeli press which is one of the things that makes the Israeli president and the Knesset debates a pleasure to read they its central and recurring pointed source book that the Jews hold themselves to a higher standard they have been they they've been reminded of that and they constantly remind themselves of that and reading reading Martin Gilbert's history of Israel which I recently did there is there's definitely a drift away from the moral the moral standard that Israel set itself around 1977 with the switch historic switch from labor to Lee could and then you do immediately get Sharon calling for censorship with that shift but begi in and so on and you know Saul says that Israel should have been a sanctuary that was the idea and not the Holocaust not the museum equipped with an air force which is what it's often in danger of becoming it seems so it you know any whisper of of muffling those voices is is pernicious in the context of Israel the Jews have to be able to speak out of course they do and Christopher you said earlier that's something I'll stand up you said earlier that something was a tremendous waste of Jewishness and it sounded like a challenge so I just want to ask you what is Jewishness for well I think argue against myself here's this beautiful question I mean I want to argue this myself in a way and that I don't think these things are really in the genes or can be but there's something in the in the history and in the culture and the tradition if you want that is very reverent for learning which means almost by definition very insistent on skeptical inquiry free inquiry and very aware that there's no such thing as natural justice that does perche was to put said we're not put on this earth for pleasure there and if you like some of that is in Asia if it isn't in age it's obviously not in genetic it's it's in cultured and I very suspicious of anything that contradicts or dislikes that and I certainly think that any any Jewish voice that's our the uniform politically or confessional II or messianic Lee is is to that extent a negation of what is valuable and wonderful and terrible about the collective experience in all countries and it's almost all times I yes that would be a waste of Judaism to be known to know what the Jews are for is for seriousness it's a country without small talk Israel and it was a black day I thought for the country when allow was banned from by the Knesset from landing or taking off on the Sabbath that's not serious that's not Jewish no you can't we have guys to do that oh yeah sure let's go edges that that's it easy the fact the Jews are the first ones to find out that God is a fool and that if you milk the cow with with the bucket under it that's no good because that's violation but if you leave the bucket under the cow and someone else who isn't Jewish comes along and just decides to milk that's kosher milk you think God doesn't notice well I could have told you that to begin with other religions don't have this kind of if you like William to prophecy what is the story Irving how used to tell this story I remember very well it's about I think it's about the child of helm the shtetl of fools where there's a guy on the ramparts of this ramshackle shuttle and he just stands there gazing out across the swine strewn planes of the going from dawn till dusk with a fixed expression on his face and so what are you doing what what's your job is that were they pay me to do it that I'm supposed to keep an eye out for the Messiah's arrival and to ring this bell if he if I see him coming choosing his words with care says well how's it going if that just were steady work there's a great Israeli rock group I forgot its name now I've had a big hit that three years ago at the time of the missiles actually saying the Messiah is not coming he's not even gonna call and of course the religious Jews opposed the the State of Israel of course I didn't mention in the anti Zionist critique though I mean you would have to repress a great deal of Judaism I mean I should be the first to say that if you repress the anti Zionist tree because I sometimes would go to meet the nuts or ricotta types and others who you know once you've got over their view that the earth is four hundred and fifty no four thousand and three hundred years older and so they very good Talmudic argument about all kinds of things and they they really believe it's a blasphemy to have a secular is very state nothing like that can be allowed it's condemned until the until the Messiah comes and there are quite a number of such sets and there always were so you'd have to still the arguments within childhood exuded azzam in order to say Jews mustn't criticize in front of the and saying you mustn't criticize in front of the is to replicate the cringe in the first place that says you're shuffling around the shtetl hoping not to attract attention that's your love to mention so I think in a way all these questions answer themselves each sorry I want to try as christopher hitchens well ladies first i think i want to ask christopher hitchens whether he thinks he's become more jewish by living in america and how he would characterize the difference between British Jews and American Jews did everyone hear the question well the answer I'll be enough is in a way yes I mean if I I think if I've been brought up in the United States I would not have lived as long as I did wondering why my grandmother looked like a gypsy which is what I thought she I would have recognized her more swiftly as a Finnick Roth character then dodeth mrs. Levin then I did in England where these things are much more reticent lead over yes it's very it's a very it's a very forward thing including in my not just in my favorite city of New York but my hometown of Washington DC it's a question of who is and who is into his inauguration what the implications of it are is an everyday very major frontal discussion my impression was when I lived here haven't done it for a long time that's not so much the case and I don't know which I prefer by the way I think I prefer the America there has been this joycie need to consider when abusing British years yes but there's a demonstrate American Jews in almost every other time of truth which is this that they're there did you see any of you the recent discovery of the letters of Anne Frank's father yes you did see that extraordinary and the ways in which everyone to whom he wrote from Amsterdam trying to get out was good everyone in America including Jewish friends and Justin Rose always raising the bar if you can provide a few more character references if you can deposit a bit more a bank in New York if you can show that you're not a communist or we've always kept on there's a the resident in among American Jews a terrible shame about that period which is identified as some of you also know with rabbi Stephen wise and many people that for that period be the realization that they they could have done a great deal and they didn't and the absolute determination if you like cancel that miserable thought and they can't because it keeps on coming back and the idea that we'd have had to wait this long to find in New Jersey the letters begging from Anne Frank's father is proof enough of that just extraordinary yes that's what makes them in right and Jews feel a special responsibility no question about it I don't think that anyone in Britain feels quite that way about the Nazi period first because Britain did take quite a lot of Jewish refugees even though it often in turn them as enemy aliens when they got here and of course tried to turn people away from Palestine and it's it isn't it isn't this horrible the memory isn't discussed also we have a more shameful history in that we banished them for four centuries in the Middle Ages and there's no equivalent period in American history perhaps one more there was a gentleman standing right at the front there George Steiner commented that every Jew should sleep I should sleep with full suitcase by the front door and be able to speak a number of languages it presumably hopefully won't come to that well I think every person should probably have the suitcase at least mentally packed and to be polyglot is there's no there's no shame in that the problem is where are you gonna go with this suka for example people say to me well why you critical design is what if you know the fascists took over the United States what if what if there was a big movement of what if it all happened it never has what if it did I say well I would consider it my duty not to abandon my post and resist by all means any challenge of that kind to the American Constitution I'd be ashamed of saying well I have another appointment in Hebron while the while the United States goes on to the fascism that I would think that was disgraceful in the first place in the second place because if I moved to Hebron and a nuclear-armed United States has taken over by an anti-semitic movement I'm not going to have moved far enough am I so if you at my of my doubts words an ism oh so to speak existential in that way and there but they also involved with questionable principle would it would it be right to say well you guys live under fascism I'm going off to the hungry that I can't think of a more wasteful attitude to one's Jewishness Philipp rather novel plot against America imagine this the rise of fascists administration in America and the marginalization of the Jews as a prelude to sterner measures but as by James in his review of that book he said that as Roth must have felt halfway through the book that the trouble with it with the plot against America is that America is against the plot the traditions just aren't there there are two very prominent Americans now who both derived from Charles Lindbergh's matter first movement and both from opposite directions converge as strong proponents of the intervention in Iraq for example an American policy in the region Pat Buchanan and gore Vidal both explicitly say that Charles Lindbergh is their political role model political role model and hero the bro model is the word I would never use in any other context I promise you but some of us has to be used Pat Buchanan says has brought up to worship ISM as a hero and gore Vidal says he was the hero not just of himself but over the family in which he was brought up and they were both men who was old enough to actually be a member of America first Lindburgh ism is is one of the great practical jokes on the american anti-war movement people go and hear these guys thinking they're anti imperialist speakers they don't realize what they're listening to his America first isolationists whose movement was founded by someone who was very indulgent to anti-semitism and who took her a medal from Goering and accused the Jews of being the authors of the Second World War so I find I find this this thread what I described earlier is that the protein character of any service and the different shape shifting forms it takes is always worth paying attention to and like love pests like to make another reference to come along the the may go dormant for a very long time they may go right back into the sewers for a very long time but one day will set its rats up to die again in a free city ladies and gentlemen thank you very much please I will ask you to remain seated for a few more minutes we've got a special announcement to make and Peter levy chairman of the JC and our sponsor would like to personally thank Martin and Christopher and make this special announcement thank you thank you very much firstly since I'm speaking now can I on behalf of everybody and on behalf of the Jewish Chronicle thank you professor Amos and you Christopher Hitchens for a most interesting enjoyable and interesting insight into Judaism and Jewish the Jewish world I think that we've been privileged this evening for listening to this dialogue and very much appreciate your being here thank you very much indeed the Jewish Chronicle has been involved and sponsored and been associated with Jewish Book Week for a number of years as you know and has been the media sponsor for the last 13 years and we've always enjoyed that this is one of the consistently most successful Jewish cultural events in the calendar for London and always has a tremendous response and a tremendous audience and we're delighted to be associated with it this evening we are announcing in conjunction with Jewish Book Week and the Jewish Book Council the launch of the high moment journalist prize many of you will remember high moment as a an author and a journalist and a columnist of the Jewish Chronicle for I don't know 40 years or so whose witty insights into the community and as a chronicler of the day were not to be missed and anybody who associated themselves with the Jewish Chronicle red hind Vermont and we're delighted this evening that his widow judy beaumont is with us this prize were initiating in conjunction with the Jewish Book Week has two parts one for any journalist and secondly for young aspiring journalists this prize will be looked into by a panel of judges one of whom will be the editor of the Jewish Chronicle David Rowan Jonathan Freedland is another and there are others who will be participating in this the first submissions will be required by the end of October this year and all information and details and terms and conditions can be found either on the Jewish Chronicle website or on the Jewish Book Council website or communicating directly with them I think it's taken us a long time Judy to get to this point but I think that in memory of hi in Vermont this is an appropriate thing to do and we very much look forward to the interesting responses which we hope to get from it and hope that it will be worthwhile and beneficial towards journalism generally and particularly Jewish journalism I'd like to say that the Jewish Chronicle has always appreciated very much and enjoyed its association with Book Week and we look forward to many further years together and to the success of Jewish Book Week continuing as it as it clearly seems to be this evening thank you very much Martin and Christopher Connelly agreed to sign their books and they will be signing their books in the Book Fair over there thank you you

Channel: TheHitchensArchive

Views: 30,320

Rating: 4.7969542 out of 5

Keywords: Christopher Hitchens (Author), Martin Amis, iq2, jew, israel

Id: 4-5xXDvORf0

Length: 91min 41sec (5501 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/ChBowling]

One of my favorites, nice post. Great to see Hitchens and Amis interacting.