Stanley Spatz responds to Deborah Lipstadt on George Soros

To the Editor:

In her interview with Felicia Herman, Ambassador Lipstadt decries the current antisemitic trends, citing among them “attacks on George Soros.” There is plenty of legitimate criticism of Soros’ political machinations that has nothing to do with his being born a Jew. Such attacks are in substance no more antisemitic than critiques of Barack Obama were fundamentally racist. His ethnicity is simply irrelevant. To see Soros primarily as a Jew — to see Jewish athletes, judges, and entrepreneurs as Jewish athletes, Jewish judges, and Jewish entrepreneurs — merely reinforces the pernicious notion of the Jew’s “otherness”:  “. . . it is because he is never accepted as a man, but always and everywhere as the Jew [original italics] that the Jew is unassimilable” (Jean-Paul Sartre in “Anti-Semite and Jew”). As an invention of the Church (as James Carroll posits in Constantine’s Sword), the main solution to antisemitism must be found there; the only Jewish response may be exposing and denouncing all expressions of Jew hatred, but be careful: not every personal attack against a Jew is an assault against the Jews.