Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis - No Laughing Matter [2007] [WITH VIDEO]

for someone exactly like you well ladies and gentlemen brothers and sisters comrades friends shalom um we don't have a chair and i'm not going to appoint myself as such but someone has to start and it's going to be martin professor amos will give you uh an opening an opening burst about uh sorbello on which i'll endeavor to comment and elaborate and then there might be a bit of crosstalk 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 me um bear that in mind if you would um professor good evening i hope you can all hear me um it's meant to be about saul 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 uh i went to israel with him in fact for a saul bello conference and um 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 are things like you know the encaged cash register existentialism and early saw bella he said if i have to listen to another word of this i i think i'm going to die he said so we we're going to talk about israel too via his book to jerusalem back and of course his lifelong concern and anxiety about his about israel the phrase anti-semitism was coined in the 1870s by a german journalist called wilhelm maher whose noble intention it was to get people to stop hating jews for religious reasons and start hating them for cultural and racial reasons uh saul used to say that i said to him norman cohn in his book warrant 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 rife at present i feel here in england um you know a certain kind of bian passage here is you know never more gorgeously at his ease never more exquisitely complacent than when attacking israel and trying to de-legitimize israel so i hope we'll talk more about what what anti-semitism is but um i'm going to cheer you up by talking about phylosemitism the word s see my and semitism remains problematic but philo we all know what that means love off um i am a philosopher and i will give you a little how-to course on what you have to do to create an anti-semite a phylochemist a big advantage it's no problem creating anti-semitism um 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 about 13 one of our we had many close family friends who are jewish uh theo richmond was among them we were playing scrabble my father and me and theo and my father didn't actually put down the tiles but he he suggested the word yid and at 13 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 you're watching some uh innovatory new tv program and then when the credits come up you find yourself going ah there's another one there's another one um although he would have been horrified by and actively horrified by any actual stuff that was actually pro-israel um on the other hand my mother was a woman of uh 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 actually not tea it's a sort of meal and he said um with cakes and he said he said nah he said your mother wouldn't like me because i'm black and i said with full conviction my my mother won't even notice that you're black so that kind of background helps then um 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 uh her mother was secretary to lord thief her grandmother was so it was great very sweet and i wish i'd talked more to her so observant that in her pantry even the instant coffee was kosher gold blend instant coffee um so give her the first love with a beautiful jewish girl then then later on um have his oldest and closest friend christopher discover movingly in the year i think 1989 that he was in fact jewish um and that's i thought that's why i loved him what wasn't for his qualities because he was the jew um i can't make this completely chronological but um by that time i was not only completely in love with the novels of sorbelo but um beginning to be a good friend of his too the man who emancipated the jews into the american artistic mainstream i think that's one of his incidental achievements and to show perhaps a 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 you're worrying about silent anxiety and i was moved over the years to write a novel about the holocaust and more recently a novel about the antes the holocaust that never happened which was um the starnest holocaust that was all set to go in 1953 the jewish doctors were going to be hanged on red square and then the jews two and a half million of them i think would to be to run the gauntlet to be robbie jan on the chinese border where according to sergeants and barracks were already being 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 um a jewish wife my wife isabelle fonseca and two uh jewish daughters who they're only quarter jewish but by jewish law 100 percent 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 subvocalize them as the jews where are the jews shouldn't the jews be home by now where are those jews where are these jews there's lousy jews um and it's of 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 um now i'm going to read before we widen out again i'll read a bit of the ending of a saw bellow short story called the old system this is 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 um and she says they've had a frudder for many years and she says she will see him on her deathbed if he gives her thirty thousand dollars because she feels she was stiffed on an earlier uh 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 and 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 waisted finger she's dying do you know but then it was tied to tina's waisted finger with dental floss she held out her hand to the nurse the nurse cut the thread tina 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 perhaps the cold eye was better on life on death but again the cold of the eye 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 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 you wet 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 a promise 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 isaacs and these tinas when dr brown closed his eyes he saw red on black something like molecular processes the only true heraldry of being as later in the close 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 begetting spasm billions of years ago now i my views on israel my feelings impressions about israel are just those feelings and impressions and for political analysis we will depend on the hitch but uh it does seem to me that has there ever been a state in history that is so dependent on a motion uh twelve years after the war of independence yigael yadin asked when the victory 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 um and just a couple of short lines from from saul's book 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 very eloquent anxiety um i sometimes think there are two israels 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 inestimably 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 cannot take your right to live for granted others can you cannot this is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and well 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 refuse 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 the 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 nationalists 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 bloot and eisen 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 um just wind up and pass this on to christopher bernary levy wrote a piece in the new york times magazine this last summer saying that when when these um twirling [ __ ] rockets from uh 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 um and don't you feel sometimes the crisis that the world is in at the moment is a crisis of mere weaponry or pure weaponry the weaponization of all grievance and how long can israel born in war and nurtured by siege as abba eban put it how long can it live this life of intense anxiety and this has been a summer full of importance and um and it was in the the pensive setting of of las vegas in the summer that christopher and i admitted to a new order of anxiety about the future in israel well um i suppose i also should feel i owe you a statement of my own position on one or two things i uh i'm accommodated for the exact opposite end i think from the one that martin began with for most of my life i thought that the only principle worth upholding worth defending worth 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 the 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 uh hatred and suspicion but never able to uh escape from the fact that while i was unwilling to say anything under this heading for myself except that as i early 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 to speak about this in my in my own behalf i still regard israel not as the answer to the diaspora or as an alternative to the diaspora but as a large part of the jewish jasper i was asked a very intelligent question by a lady from jewish chronicle earlier this week about whether i would feel unease at being jewish if i came back to england and i said well well she correctly reported that many jews do feel currently agree on i so i i don't ever expect or actually want to feel at ease and i don't think it's in the fate 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 and i don't want us to become as a working place and there's a wonderful expression in victor klemperer's diaries of the third reich which i hope everyone here has read or will read or is reading where he says in conversation with a comrade as the net titans around them 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 it will never change it will always be insecure and unstable 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 i liked when i was a marxist i still have a marxist but i'm no longer a socialist was uh some of you talmudists will get this i think uh was not just the fantastic contribution of to modernity of marx and freud and einstein and kafka and billy wilder uh but the uh innate tendency to fracture side uh and disputation and dialectic that was uh to be found um among it among us as it were and the and the feeling always wherever you were you would always be in exile okay fine by me i don't i don't repudiate this in fact i welcome it uh i could go on about this a lot i will actually succeeded i can't often do this with martin in surprising him a few nights ago i can't even surprise him that's to say on any literary matter i said that theodore herzl was the only person who'd ever written a utopian novel that as it were come true no but al noyland very bad novel in many ways but the only novel ever about a future society that could be said to be the blueprint of a naturally 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 um believe me i could go on a lot about this but i feel i should say why i think sorbelo is a great help in decoding some of it um and i think it's principally a literary question 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 kite as he called it the murder of the english language in the torture rooms uh of the jewish coffee houses and clubs and bars you couldn't believe that the pure well of english had been so defiled by these these the aliens of israel as he called them and for a very long time this was this was a regular feeling feeling was a regular policy in the american academy i'm sure many of you know lionel trilling was was at one point refused tenure at columbia university on the grounds that has a marxist to freudian and a jew and they might as well just have come right out with it he wouldn't be able to understand the specially sensitive register of english literature he 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 bellows 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 those whose parents and grandparents spoke yiddish and came to america as despised immigrants often illegal as in the case of the below family as you know perhaps saul didn't realize he wasn't an american until he went to join the united states army in 1941. he was told you're not on the books your parents were illegal immigrants from canada you have to go back and become a citizen and then you can apply to join our army that's part of the background of dangling man um never being sure of a place that he suddenly finds that he's he's witnessed for literature in english written in a subtle and marvelous way that the admirers of henry james have no alternative but to praise and to respect mutation nutanist this goes also of course for norman mailer for philip roth um for joseph hello 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 sorbelo who translated the love song of jail prufrock into yiddish you try it um who with irving howe and other members of the descent magazine and partisan review group discovered the wonderful treasure house of the work of isaac bashevis singer hitherto really only available to those who could buy the jewish daily forward and read it in in english 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 uh 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 editors low-life patios the sort of place where american literature is considered towards sundown um but there it is nobody nobody doesn't talk now with some acknowledgement not just of kafka and so but as it were of of woody allen and i guess i should add that's what i always liked again about the jewish tradition even reading the the to me hateful maimonides it's remarkable when he says in guided 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 my mondays if you want to everyone knows what i'm talking about i think hopes bellow ennobled all this uh in an extraordinary way but it's not politically without problem um it was said of camus la peste that it doesn't mention any arabs just as it's been said of um that as jerusalem it seems to me that i read mr samuel's planet before i read to jerusalem 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 uh jewish americans and black americans especially in new york and in chicago elsewhere too but particularly there and that the the sense of threat that some jews were beginning to feel in the school boards and districts of ocean hills and brownsville in brooklyn and in the south side of chicago was in a sense replicated through the experience of teddy colic via ed koch if you're following me about this i can elaborate if you like in a kind of allegory of um a black jewish rivalry which worried 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 um to both parties occurring here i thought it needed to be analyzed it became it's even more clarified in um because this tendency among jewish americans acquired the name of neoconservatism at a very early stage when i think it was known podhorace pointed out with his customary grace and tact that american jews had the uh this is how he put it the income pattern of episcopalians in the voting pattern of puerto ricans i think you can tell the sort of tone of voice that's involved it's refined by bello in in his book ravelsy which martin has never forgiven me for reviewing as if it was in some sense a non-fiction book as if it was the the debt he promised to pay to alan 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 uh school on uh committee on social thought chaired by nathan tarkov a friend of mine old friend of bellows and leo strauss's and alan blooms and poor wolf which is and in there it is it is said that the greatest shame of the united states in the recent past is its failure to put an end to the vile regime of saddam hussein in 1991 that no no subsequent failure has been as shameful as that 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 that it was the way which he accepted the challenge of the political critique i think i probably said enough on that heading now excuse me mark does that does that mind you to say yeah um he said once i don't think he's ever said this in print but he saw that i once said privately he said without israel jewish manhood would be finished he said um i don't think he meant jewish men he meant jewish self-respect uh but it was a sort of activistic way of putting it um he was felt that this idea that the jews we're going to bring it about that the jews cannot be put to death as he put it um is institutionalized in the state and um 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 uh when september the 11th happened he he didn't take it in he didn't really take it in amazingly because he was just a month before i'd seen him for several days and he seemed you know drifting in and out a bit short-term memory a bit but um totally accomplishments but 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 um he one of his unfinished books was called all marbles still accounted for but um when the marbles are perhaps under threat um there's a certain size of events that you can't assimilate and i think he knew that he sensed not only that this was an enormous event but it was an enormous event that would redound somehow on israel and during last summer when when these these unpleasant portents for israel were emerging there was a great effort essence of anti-semitism here if you remember those middle class whities waddling around under placards saying we are all headspola now um well enjoy while you can because hassan wants to kill you um he knew that this perhaps was going to be a defeat for israel and i'd like to ask christopher about this the rise the rise of islamism which by the way um we know the muslim brotherhood brotherhood got started in the 1920s in egypt and had been brewing for a long while before but um it crystallized with some 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 packs americana of american domination in the middle east and again i'm not hazy about all this but which began in 1989 or 1991 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 um nearer to eclipse or partial eclipse um and this is not good news for israel the worst uh disagreement i had in person with silver was about a friend of mine edward saeed a co-author of mine well actually that's rating myself too high i co-edited a book with him um at that point edward syed was a from a christian family and was an atheist and didn't have a racist uh nerve in his home a ganglion but it was just a clash as it were between two kinds of nationalism uh in palestine and i would have said at that point that vero had been overreacting uh hadn't been understanding enough about what the jabotinsky revisionists form of zionism had done on the west bank and in gaza wasn't willing to concede uh enough of that partly because of indeed you're quite right about the manhood question very very many american jews felt that they could look anyone in the eye after 1967 the reputation of of jews as being unmilitary cowardly the luft mensch as herzl used to call it was gone a slight element of hubris there i thought i also thought below 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 uh administration had publicly accused jewish doctors of giving the aids virus to black babies i said well now look it's he okay he's a nut case he's a sword 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 too polite like about it well look how am i supposed to talk now allegations like this are commonplace now 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 re-crudest 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 crummiest sorts of russian christian orthodox fabrication i refuse to call the protocols of the elders design of forgery as they are commonly called then 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 that's in their charter it's impossible to overstate this kind of thing and now i now i wish i as martin must for many other reasons to i wish i could have my conversation with with bella back again wish i could refine it a bit uh wish i could have uh made my own points a little sharper and 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 a 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 is good i like i like it but it's quite generally quite hard to be a little bit anti-semitic and i should just end when you where you started about the psychosis of course steve coakley 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 or they don't like indians because of the smell of their cooking or they don't like um koreans for their kimchi or whatever it might be everyone every minority majority in 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 or any of this it's a it's a theory it's a paranoid theory that tries to explain quite a lot it it's fascinated with gold with secret documents with missing codicils in ancient treaties uh with the idea of an invisible and secret government it's a it's a very very very dangerous pseudo-intellectual uh prejudice indeed and i think bello 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 seeing 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 changes that it poses and i that's why i don't apologize for taking such a long time to make this point um we might just talk a little bit more about what anti-semitism is um you've described it as paranoia and it is it's it belongs with the the sort of the shit-head conspiracy theory and um and there's a marvelous quote from hitler saying that uh in the frankfurt further zeitgeist there was a ringing exposure of the protocols of the elders of zion as being a fabrication or forgery as he would have said this alone proves that it is genuine you know where do you begin it's it's not quite a neurosis it's not quite a psychosis vastly grossman in life and faith suggests that it's that uh anti-semitism is is like a vast mirror and it's it's an ocean of insecurities um that you know the cruising insecurities in the common mind for some reason gravitate towards the jew as the explanation of and reason for all frustrations um 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 um all the usual stuff but you also suspect they're running your life and um they're both you know contemptible and all powerful nobody thinks that west indians are trying to take over wall street for example i say nothing i don't i hope no one thinks i'm making a joke at the expense of jamaicans say that it's just not alleged people who hate them don't say they're trying to take over uh the international financial system i think the thing my grandmother whose origins were in what is now rochefort was then breslau had a very simple explanation says oh come on darling there is jealous um well go ahead of course can be as jealous as they like but it's actually it's the protein 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 there's got to be one or the other but often both um and as the crew 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 anything you like the depressing thought about this being that there's something in radical inerratical 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 there have been 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 around the place one way or another 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 had a square look at both of them they said no no they took the maimonides view the messiah still tarries 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 facetime 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 the sunlight since their own emancipation into secularism the world of einstein freud marx kafka and the rest of them 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 the following prophecies looking for holy places or holy sites or so on 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 in a minute or you will it probably can't be eradicated because um we know of the phenomenon of anti-semitism without jews there are places with no jews at all where anti-semitism thrives so it does seem to be like several other regrettable human traits just a part of being human and a despicable part but apart so well you know at that point i think it's possible bewitched as you are the insufferable complacency of these two uh young english golden boys quasi-semitic uh claims um 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 and we overlooked him so left i don't want to no thank you you wanted to you want to step on my well no thank you hi um i've got first of all i'd just like to say it's really really wonderful to see you both here and feel really honoured that you're here 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 um because that's also genetic partly and i wonder whether you um have interest in it or in manic depression yeah that's a woody allen question no i think it's um it's it's an absolutely tragic condition but um and and funnily enough one of its symptoms is anti-semitism um uh it is um another of its symptoms is ordering grand pianos um and royals rice's and i i had a friend whose husband was manic depressive and she went to the hospital and i went to the doctor and he said what's he doing now she said rolls royces and he said well it would be grand piano's next and she drove home and there's a grand piano being winched into that i think it's uh it's um it's it's uh it's it's very humiliating when you start following a a kind of schedule of uh ridiculous behavior um reinforcing the view that that insanity is is it's not as if you're going to do anything you're going to be doing these specific things and um you know 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 um this seems you know more and more urgent to me not using the the kind of language that everyone else is using a no-brainer and went pear-shaped and don't do that that you reveal your low cultural level so starkly when you use these phrases that are that are skimming around these eight already aging novelties that's you know some people their whole vocabulary consists of seeing it done it had a banana um that's a real humiliation you've got to stress the power of the individual and of course that's what magic depression like many other things completely strips you off in one of martin's father's novels there's a very arresting and haunting description of someone whose mind is becoming unraveled and an unfailing predictive sign of that and i've seen it myself in many cases is is the feeling of anti-jewish persecution or the feeling that jews are pervasive and everywhere and any anyone who's uh professionally involved in this phenomenon will tell you the same it's an 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 is another element in this um you always think he's trying to be you or you're trying to be him jews electricity mick jagger um you know what could be more humiliating it's quite a good company i mean the right way but but the fact that the jews are wired in even to this well-mapped and miserably predictable uh psychosis is i think you know almost a poeticism but also again showing us that it is it is uh 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 uh 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 um i i i understand the meaning of that uh identifying as jews through feeling uh fearful of anti-semitism well that doesn't make it it doesn't i could just tell you for myself my mother wanted to pass um 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 first-born son to be given any bother for being the son of a jewish woman in fact she wanted me to be an english gentleman you'd be the judge of how well that worked out um 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 um 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 uh would make me change my mind about that it's not a matter of going around affirming it or wearing a star of david or anything this sort of my name just i would never say no if i was asked i don't think that's too much to ask you i think by the way can you think of anyone any other minority in the world that has this question in his mind making the point that saul bellow is making oh martian was ventriloquising from soul polish people don't have this problem english people by definition don't have this problem uh slovaks don't have this problem jews do why the hell is that they should keep a low profile and not earn any any money and not make any contribution to the arts or the stay away from nuclear physics above all yeah and psychiatry it's it's actually said and this is an extraordinary thought that the great uh efflorescence 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 adjective in front of it like cowardly or miserable or abject that's because uh jewish science had shown had shown the essential weirdness of many things about the human condition einstein showed the weirdness of space freud the weirdness of of of human psychology and that caused a revolt against reason absolutely i'm sorry uh that reminded me of something i used to be friendly with jacobo timmerman who some of you will have i hope heard of and maybe read his book about being the editor of la opinion the best paper in buenos aires when the fascist dictatorship took over argentina in the uh 70s and he was um disappeared as they used to say inaudible 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 the questioning and they his uh fascist uh georgia said you know we know what it is to be a jew uh senator timmerman you who claim to be an argentine said you've ruined our entire lives he said your your einstein has ruined christian cosmology and replaced it with chaos and speculation we used to know how the heavens worked and now we spoiled all that your dr freud has ruined our family values and our certainties about uh the the decencies of uh the organic christian family and your doctor marx has made christian economics impossible uh 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 for christians and muslims to never forgive the fact that uh jewish people were the first to see through their false claims of prophecy be proud of this i would i am comrade bring it on martin i wondered if you could share with us the most amusing insightful moment that you shared with can you give it some welly sir okay i wondered martin if you could share with us the most amusing and insightful moment that you shared with saul bello please well it would be at the expense of the hit and i had to say bring it on didn't i well i i i i will do this briefly and and tenderly but um i took christopher to meet saw in vermont saw his wife janice and we had a very nice drive from cape cod to vermont buddy movie bloody movie radio on um then we got there and i said on the way i said no sinister balls okay which is our code for you know the politicizing yeah of making everything suddenly very steely and political and he said i am and um then went into a four-hour blue streak of parachute about about israel and uh and it was it was i mean i can't understand why they didn't hit it off immediately because they're both both jews both ex-trots um both rebels above all but it was one of those antimatter meets matter um and then as we were sitting over the ruins of the of the evening i'm sorry and and hitch had been defending edward snyden and he said whom admittedly saul called a terrorist um it was by no means um you know one-sided and then but not nonetheless uh cite paul over the the end of the dinner and and christopher said well i'm sorry if i went on a bit but um edward said he's a friend of mine and um and if i hadn't defended him i would have felt bad and then there was a silence and soul said how do you feel now i've never had a chance before to so it's settle down i hope you've got a drink and everything this may take me some time uh i'll make a chance you should read martin's account of this in in his wonderful memoir experience which i hope is pile high outside the hall as well as at find bookstores everywhere it's the it's the most rational 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 too couldn't fault it except for one tiny thing which was that wrong cigarettes um when he said look don't oppress him with politics i said don't worry but i won't do that but i knew he was a very political man always had been and used to be one of the artists of new politics used to be very involved in the short skills movement and so on we had a few handholds when we arrived you've forgotten this but i thought i did you credit he said to us um 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 um on his first day well have you had your interview with whitaker chambers yet then the boss of time said didn't know we needed a meeting with mr chairman yes you do you'll take place at three o'clock this afternoon went into the office toad-like figure of chambers sitting behind the desk mr bello take a seat tell me what was your course of study at the university mello said i studied english literature chamber said very good the queen of subjects give me your view if you would mr bello william wordsworth as a poet bello said i don't dissent from the prevailing view he was a romantic poet chambers said there is no place for you in this organization you must be out of the office by close of business this afternoon told this story which you can read in a fictional version in um victim uh mr rudiger does this to better and he told us the story brilliantly and we were sitting there and he said he had and i realized i had simultaneously had the same two thoughts he wondered what if he kept the job he might have been remembered as the book critic for time magazine a horrifying thought and then the second question also had occurred to me i was determined to do my best for mark 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 a monarchist that would have kept you and below said you know what that's that's obviously right that's what he was hoping i would say so i thought i'd done a bit of credit for them but but as chekov says when there's a [ __ ] great revolver on the mantelpiece in the first act it'll be fired by act three and the and the only in this the house of this consummately illiterate man and all his books where we were sitting on the low-life patios um or outside having a drink it was only one thing to read on view and it was commentary magazine and the cover story read edward syed 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 is martin going to know i wouldn't defend him when he wasn't here picture if you will just to wind it up i rang the next day and i said i you know so sorry it didn't work out and um christopher went on and saw said oh don't worry he said he he was never anything but totally sweet to me and he said he said i get that all the time and i said that's what the hitch said um so we've been through a lot of severe talmudic and trotskyist and old sectarian arguments he liked that kind of thing it was one of the i also think he made tremendous use of it in his fiction in a very un dogmatic way all of 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 there's one here um i'm interested to a really brief question should um 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 there'll always be someone else who'll do it no i think they shouldn't look there's um that's it yeah just don't want to step on any of your lines there is there is a very old um as you know a jewish anti-zionist tradition i mean and the use 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 and so on there was a there was a feeling one that's why arthur balfour was the great enemy of jewish immigration to britain was the king of zionists and so on and so on but there was an old jewish critique that said this is not going to come to any good you only replace the question of anti-semitism if you move it to palestine and you may do 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 it hasn't made jews safer it hasn't made them more popular um it isn't the alternative to diaspora because if 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 uh really quite a lot of lying it wouldn't just be from people who don't like jews some people have to move out so and as i say i think israel is part of a diaspora not a not an answer to an alternative to it so that's the first overarching uh point the second is that i don't think one can take part in the argument about israeli policy less vigorously than israelis do and 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 it's the central and recurring point in saul's book that 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 um 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 said itself around 1977 with the switch historic switch from labor to likud and then you do immediately get sharon calling for censorship with that shift with begging and so on and you know saul says that israel should have been a sanctuary that was the idea and not the holocaust museum equipped with an air force which is what it's often in danger of becoming it seems um so you know any whisper of of of muffling those voices is is pernicious in in the context of israel the jews have to be able to speak out of course they do um christopher you said earlier that 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 i i i want to argue against myself here's this beautiful question i mean i want to argue against 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 the tradition if you want that is very irreverent for learning which means almost by definition uh very insistent on skeptical inquiry free inquiry and very aware that there's no such thing as natural justice that as bertie worcester puts it we're not put on this earth for pleasure alone and if you like some of that is innate if it isn't innate it's obviously not genetically it's it's in cultured and i i'm very suspicious of anything that contradicts or dislikes that and i certainly think that any any jewish voice that's either uniform politically or confessionally or messianically 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 that would be it's a waste of judaism to be like that what the jews are for is for seriousness um it's a country without small talk israel and it was a black day i thought for that country when uh el ow was banned from by the knesset from landing or taking off on the sabbath that's not serious that's not jewish no you have we have guys to do that yeah you're going to do that just that it's easy the fact the jews are the first ones to find out that god is a fool and that if you milk the cow uh with uh with the bucket under it uh 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 he's an idiot well i could have told you that to begin with other religions don't have this kind of um if you like brilliant hypocrisy what is the story irving howe used to tell this story i remember very well it's about i think it's about the town of helm the shetland fools um where there's a guy on the on the ramparts of this ramshackle shuttle and he's just stands there gazing out across the swine strewn plains of the [ __ ] uh from dawn to dusk with a fixed expression on his face and so what do you what are you doing what what what's your job he said well they pay me to do it 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 it does just work steady work there's a great israeli rock group i've forgotten its name now i've had a big hit a couple years ago at the time of the missiles actually saying the messiah is not coming he's not even going to call and of course religious jews oppose the state of israel of course i didn't mention in the anti-zionist critique i mean you would have to repress a great deal of judaism i mean i i should have been the first to say that if you uh repress the anti-zionist because i i sometimes would go to meet the natora carter types and others who you know once you've got over their view that the earth is 450 no four thousand and three hundred years older they are very good talmudic arguments about all kinds of things they they really believe it's a blasphemy to have a secular israeli state nothing like that can be allowed it's condemned uh until the until the messiah comes and there are quite a number of such sects and there always were so you'd have to still the arguments within talmudic judaism 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 shuttle hoping not to attract attention that's your luft mentioned so i think in a way all these questions answer themselves sorry i wanted to ask christopher hitchens oh 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 oddly enough is in a way yes i mean if i i think if i'd 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 did i would have recognized her more swiftly as a philip roth character than dodo uh mrs levin than i did in england where these things are much more reticently dealt with 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 the question of who is and who is and who is not jewish and what the implications of that are is an everyday very major frontal discussion my impression was when i lived here haven't done it for a long time that that's not so much the case and i don't know which i prefer by the way i think i prefer the american there has been this do i see any difference in american jews and british shoes yes uh but there's a difference between american jews and almost every other kind of jew which is this um that they're very 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 uh was everyone in america including jewish friends and distant wrestlers always raising the bowl 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 always kept on there's a there is an 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 of that period the the realization that they they could have done a great deal 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 it's extraordinary yes that's what makes america american 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 it's it isn't it isn't this horrible the memory isn't just ghastly 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 in front there george steiner commented that every jew should sleep should sleep with a 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 polyglottis there's no there's no shame in that the problem is where are you going to go with this for example people say to me well why are you critical designers and what if you know the fascists took over the united states you know what if what if there was a big movement of what if it all happened it never has it'd been a big move in america but what if it did i say well i would consider it my duty not to abandon my posts and resist by all means any challenge of that kind to the american constitution i would be ashamed of saying well i have another appointment in hebron while the well the united states goes under the fascism i mean i would think that was disgraceful in the first place in the second place suppose if i move to hebron and a nuclear-armed united states is taken over by an anti-semitic movement i'm not going to have moved far enough am i so if you like my my doubts about zionism are so to speak existential in that way and but they also involve the question of principle would it would it be right to say well you guys live under fascism i'm going off to the holy land i can't think of a war uh wasteful attitude to one's jewishness philip roth's novel um the plot against america imagined this the the rise of a fascist administration in america and the marginalization of the jews as a prelude to sterner measures but um as clive james ended his review of that book he said that uh as roth must have felt halfway through the book that uh the trouble with with the plot against america is that america is against the plot uh the traditions just aren't there no though it's quite noticeable there are two very prominent americans now um who both derive from charles lindbergh's america first movement and both from opposite directions converge as strong opponents of the intervention in iraq for example and american policy in the region generally pat buchanan and gore vidal both explicitly say that charles lindbergh is their political role model political role model and hero a role model is a word i would never use in any other context i promise you but sometimes has to be used buchanan says brought up to worship as a hero and govidal says he was the hero not just of himself but of 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 lindbergh 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 and they don't realize what they're listening to is america first isolationists whose movement was founded by someone who was very indulgent to anti-semitism and who took a medal from goring and accused the jews of being the authors of the second world war so i i i find this this thread uh what i described earlier is that the protein character of antiservice and the different shape-shifting forms it takes is always worth paying attention to and like lapeste like to make another reference to camus the it may go dormant for a very long time it may go right back into the sewers for a very long time but one day we'll send 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 uh you professor amos and you christopher hitchens for a most uh interesting enjoyable and uh 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 uh 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 haimbamant journalist prize many of you will remember heimberman 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 uh the community and as a chronicler of the day uh were not to be missed and anybody who associated themselves with the jewish chronicle uh read heimbermann and we're delighted this evening that his widow judy berman is with us this prize we're 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 friedland is another and there are others who will be participating in this um 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 heimberman 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 uh the jewish chronicle is 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 kindly agreed to sign their books and they will be signing their books in the book fair over there thank you you

Channel: Here0s0Johnny

Views: 250,066

Rating: 4.7891927 out of 5

Keywords: Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, anti-semitism, judaism

Id: 0KxEFqs9yRg

Length: 91min 41sec (5501 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 11 2012