Tablet

Wading through the muck

Lee Smith is back this week with a response to the readers of his article last week in Tablet about Israel’s critics, their commenter hoardes and the “mainstreaming” of anti-Semitic invective by respectable purveyors of information. Wait, who wrote what again?

It’s complicated.

I don’t think anyone in the Sully-Walt-Greenwald camp is going to be canoodled into the Smith-Goldberg-Dershowitz camp, but you’ve got to give Lee Smith credit for actually wading through all the muck around Stephen Walt’s posts.

Highlight: One commenter on Smith’s article claims to have secret access to a Smith-inspired death-threat, but his hands are tied.

“Not only can I source the comment, I can quote it in full here and now. But Tablet Magazine has requested that I not do so.”

I guess that puts Tablet Magazine right up there with AIPAC and Jeffrey Goldberg on the “Jews Who Run the World” list.

The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

Marissa Brostoff has a piece – again in Tablet, which might be the best Jewish magazine out there – on the…well, you read the title of this post, right?

So they are a network, they are Jewish and they are left-wing. What else? Shot by both sides, apparently.

Brostoff reports:

Their elders on the radical left didn’t know what to do with them either. They were too Jewish.

“Folks like us get it from both sides,” said a 27-year-old Jewish religious professional at the conference who requested anonymity because, she said, she feared repercussions if her views became known. “We’re not loyal enough to the Jews and we’re not pure enough for the anti-Zionists.”

Loyalty versus purity? I’m not even going to comment. And genug with the anonymity. If you want to lend an air of clandestine profundity to your cause, just pretend they’re out to get you. Better, read Hans Fallada if you want to know what it’s like to live in perpetual terror of having opinions. Or talk to a few Iranian dissidents. But don’t go blabbing about being “silenced” by the Israel lobby, trying to turn yourself into a martyr for free speech.

Or was he referring the purists on the hard left?