As part of a more general discussion about what he perceives to be a tendency in some quarters to inflate the current danger of anti-Semitism, Antony Lerman raises the question whether or not Günter Grass's recent poem, 'What must be said', was an instance of anti-Semitism. I shall not here address the general issue of how serious a problem anti-Semitism now is. I shall not even adjudicate the question of whether the charge of anti-Semitism against Grass's poem is a just one. I will simply point out how cavalier Lerman is in deciding for his part that the charge is unmerited.
This is how he does it - the Lerman two-step. He doesn't neglect to refer to that element in the poem which is most problematic in the context of his central question: Grass's suggestion that Israel claims the right to a first strike that could snuff out - or destroy - the Iranian people. But, then, at no point in what follows does Lerman relate this element to the issue which his piece purports to be about. He treats it merely as being the result of 'a propensity to exaggerate'. Nice one, Tone. Simply omit the thing that might give you a problem.
Note that the question is not whether Günter Grass has an anti-Semitic mind, or had an anti-Semitic motive in writing his poem. Lerman is bound to acknowledge this, since he himself proposes for a definition of anti-Semitism one taken from Brian Klug that makes no reference to intent, but focuses rather on thematic content:
At the heart of antisemitism is the negative stereotype of 'the Jew': sinister, cunning, parasitic, money-grubbing, mysteriously powerful, and so on. Antisemitism consists in projecting this figure onto individual Jews, Jewish groups and Jewish institutions.
After quoting these words of Klug's, Lerman goes on to declare, 'If we look at Israel as a "Jewish group" and search for Klug's negative stereotype of "the Jew" projected onto Israel in Grass's poem, we find no such thing.'
Oh really? Here's a thought for him to mull over: one of the tropes of recent anti-Semitism is the would-be table-turning idea that the Jews, former victims of genocide, are now perpetrators, intent on destroying the Palestinian people, keeping them in Warsaw-Ghetto-like conditions in Gaza, just like the Nazis, and so forth. Grass now alleges, lightly as can be, that the Jewish state may have genocidal ambitions against Iran as well. For this allegation there is no evidence whatever, no more than there is for the poisonous analogies with Nazi genocide in the Palestinian case; but Lerman's not going to put himself to the trouble of considering whether such a groundless slander might have a connection with contemporary forms of Jew-hatred. Maybe it doesn't. But the possibility of it requires something more persuasive than: hey, a bit of an exagg there, Günter.
One last word. Lerman concludes with this observation:
If Grass's poem is so heinous, what language and what action would ever be appropriate in response to genuine antisemitism?
Apart from the fact that that is question-begging, since Lerman hasn't even tried to meet the difficulty he needs to, let alone succeeded in doing so, it also bespeaks an assumption that anti-Semitism isn't real until it's heinous. Mild or casual anti-Semitism is something altogether else, I suppose. Except that to think so contradicts Lerman's own favoured definition.