Attacks on Judt, Soros Reveal Blind Spots
Middle East Crisis
VIEWPOINT
Ami Eden
Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government released a deck of cards featuring the faces of its most-wanted enemies. Next came the anti-war movement's edition, topped by President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. These days, it increasingly feels as if Jewish hawks would like to release a deck of their own, with historian Tony Judt and philanthropist George Soros in a tight battle for the Ace of Spades.
Judt ignited a firestorm last month with a 2,800-word essay in The New York Review of Books arguing for the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Soros, for his part, has drawn ire over comments during a charity luncheon that critics describe as an attempt to blame the Israeli and U.S. governments for antisemitism.
Both men are accustomed to stirring controversy, and both provided plenty of fodder this time. More revealing than what either of them actually said, though, is the inability of some outspoken segments of the Jewish community to tell the two men apart.
Judt is a respected historian, head of the Remarque Institute at New York University, who set out to pen an intellectually compelling rejection of Zionism. Soros, on the other hand, is a businessman known for his prodigious charitable work in Eastern Europe; his controversial remark on antisemitism came as an off-the-cuff response to a question in front of what he thought was a private audience......
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.11.28/news14.html