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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Menachem Wecker</title>
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		<title>David Horowitz and Jewish Identity</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/menachem-wecker/david-horowitz-and-jewish-identity/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=david-horowitz-and-jewish-identity</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Nov 2010 04:06:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Menachem Wecker]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Frontpage's Editor-in-Chief discusses how he sees his work and life within the framework of Jewish history and thought.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/dh.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-76403" title="dh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/dh.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="478" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from the<a href="http://blogs.chron.com/iconia/2010/11/interview_david_horowitz.html"> ICONIA  blog</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>I heard from David Horowitz by email early in September after he saw my review <a href="http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/130997/" target="_blank">of a play at a Jewish theater in the Washington area</a>,  which I argued was unfair to him. Although the theater had canceled a  play about Bernie Madoff, because it included the character <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel" target="_blank">Elie Wiesel</a> &#8212; and the real life Wiesel pressured the theater to remove his name from the production &#8212; the playbill of Willy Holtzman&#8217;s <em>Something You Did</em> included a character identified as a Horowitz-like figure. The  character, it turns out, was whiny, a total cartoon of a conservative  pundit and frankly anything but complimentary, and arguably even  downright evil.</p>
<p>In an article <a href="http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/theater/2010/08/27/theater-js-something-you-did-like-the-play-it-replaced-prods-morality-with-real-life-stand-ins/" target="_blank">in the <em>Washington City Paper</em></a>, Ari Roth, artistic director at Theater J, which ran the play, argued it differed from <em>Imagining Madoff</em>,  because Holtzman changes his characters&#8217; names. But since Holtzman  names names in the program, I wondered aloud whether Horowitz was given  the same right of refusal afforded to Wiesel. &#8220;Or maybe, in the eyes of  Theater J, neocons just fall on the Madoff side of the equation,&#8221; I  wrote.</p>
<p>After having an email exchange with <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/about/david-horowitz/" target="_blank">Horowitz</a>, who is founder and the president of the <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/" target="_blank">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a>, Editor-in-Chief of <a href="http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/" target="_blank"><em>FrontPage Magazine</em></a> and author of <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=WOWRPR5ZNKR8" target="_blank">a staggering number of books</a> and essays, I posed four questions to him about his Jewish identity. He  discussed his favorite Jewish authors and artists and the role Israel  plays in Jewish writing.</p>
<p><strong>ICONIA: </strong>Do you identify as a Jewish writer <em>per se</em>? What, if anything, does the term mean to you?</p>
<p><img src="http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/david_p.jpg" alt="" hspace="15" vspace="15" width="240" align="right" /> <strong>DH:</strong> It&#8217;s one of the existential givens about being born a Jew &#8212; or  maybe the existential given &#8212; that there&#8217;s no way to escape this fact,  although certainly many Jews, particularly Jews on the political left,  attempt to do so.</p>
<p>When I was a leftist, I certainly would have felt uncomfortable  identifying myself as a Jewish writer, although even then I wrote a  cover feature for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramparts_%28magazine%29" target="_blank"><em>Ramparts</em></a> magazine, called &#8220;The Fate of the Jews.&#8221; The essay is still available in a collection of my writings called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Left-Illusions-Intellectual-David-Horowitz/dp/1890626511" target="_blank"><em>Left Illusions</em></a>, along with a more recent, equally lengthy piece of mine called &#8220;Why Israel is the Victim.&#8221;</p>
<p>It has been our fate as Jews, since some of our ancestors had the bad  judgment to challenge the Roman Empire, to have our backs to the wall  and to inspire enough people to hate us so that we can never forget that  we are Jews even if we would like to. Even those Jews who choose to  provide aid and comfort to our enemies &#8212; and there are many &#8212; do so  out of a perverse desire to escape the guilt they think we deserve. The  forces of Jew-hatred are on vivid display today, when Jews are faced  with a second Holocaust in the Middle East, spear-headed by Islamists  and actively abetted by the secular left, many of whom are Jews. In  these circumstances, I could hardly think of myself as a writer outside  my identity as a Jew.</p>
<p>It is also the case, however, that ever since I wrote &#8220;The Fate of  the Jews&#8221; I have also thought of myself within the framework of Jewish  history and thought. The radical tradition into which I was born &#8212; the  hope for a &#8220;promised land&#8221; in this life and on this earth, for a <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikkun_olam" target="_blank">tikkun olam</a></em>, is pretty clearly a Jewish idea, and it has become a focus of my writing in recent years.</p>
<p>I first confronted this issue in an essay called &#8220;The Radical Left and the Fate of the Jews,&#8221; which was about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi" target="_blank">false messiah Shabbatai Zvi</a> and was published in a book called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/POLITICS-BAD-FAITH-Radical-Americas/dp/0684856794" target="_blank"><em>The Politics of Bad Faith</em></a>. It is also a theme of the elegy I recently wrote for my daughter Sarah, who was deeply involved in Judaism, called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Heart-David-Horowitz/dp/1596981032" target="_blank"><em>A Cracking of the Heart</em></a>.</p>
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<p><strong>ICONIA: </strong>Who are some of your favorite Jewish writers and artists?</p>
<p><strong>DH: </strong>My favorite novelist is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow" target="_blank">Saul Bellow</a>. I am also a fan of some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Roth" target="_blank">Phillip Roth</a> books, particularly <em>The Counterlife</em>, <em>American Pastoral</em> and <em>Sabbath&#8217;s Theater</em>. Among younger writers, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Is_Illuminated" target="_blank">Jonathan Safran Foer&#8217;s <em>Everything Is Illuminated</em></a> is a small masterpiece. Among non-fiction writers, <a href="http://www.hudson.org/learn/index.cfm?fuseaction=staff_bio&amp;eid=podhnorm" target="_blank">Norman Podhoretz</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Wisse" target="_blank">Ruth Wisse</a>. Among artists, the renegade <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Mendelssohn" target="_blank">Mendelssohn</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Ravel" target="_blank">Ravel</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Copland" target="_blank">Aaron Copland</a>.</p>
<p><strong>ICONIA: </strong>To what extent, if at all, do you find that your Jewish identity affects your writing and lecturing?</p>
<p><strong>DH:</strong> My Jewish identity is now at the heart of my writing. I am working on a book in which <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoyevsky" target="_blank">Dostoevsky</a> is a central figure, the greatest critic of the messianic delusion,  which is the gift of the Jews that threatens to engulf us through the  combined forces of radical Islam and radical socialism. But Dostoevsky  was also a passionate anti-Semite and Russian messianist who inspires  Jew-haters in our own day.</p>
<p><strong>ICONIA: </strong>Israel is obviously on the minds of many Jews. Do you  think every Jewish writer has to take a stance on Israel, or is Israel  (and Israeli politics) not necessarily a Jewish issue?</p>
<p><strong>DH:</strong> Every Jew and every Jewish writer defines himself by his stance  or lack of a stance towards the only Jewish state. Israel is the Jew  writ large. The attacks on Israel are no different from the attacks on  Jews through the centuries. If Israel were a totalitarian, genocidal  theocracy like Iran or Palestinian Gaza or the West Bank, then its  critics would have a case. But since it is a democracy, the most  tolerant, civilized and benevolent country in the Middle East, which  provides more rights and privileges to its Muslim minority than any  Muslim state in the world, the attacks on Israel &#8211; under siege by forces  that seek to wipe it from the face of the earth &#8212; are forms of  Jew-hatred identical to those of the past, from the times of Vespasian  and Mohammed to that of Adolf Hitler.</p>
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