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believes, the source of bitter and recurrent resentment toward the people who dreamed up these impossible demands. As I suggested, this can, even if it’s not intended to, devolve into a blame-the-victims argument.
    Others say it’s because Jews have long chosen to be “a people apart,” with an unwillingess to assimilate or submerge their identity in modernity’s universalism. Others maintain it was the Jews’
invention
of modernity. The explanations multiply and contradict one another.
    And perhaps—and this might sound at first like a radical suggestion—
it
doesn’t matter anymore
. The reasons, the origins, no longer matter. At this point anti-Semitism has become so embedded in history, or in sub-history, the subterranean history and mythology of hatred, that it will always be there, a template for whatever hurts need to find an easy answer, a simple-minded balm: the Jews are responsible. The explanation of renewed anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism: its ineradicable pre-existing history—and its efficacy. It has become its own origin.
    What is to be done? One answer was suggested by Leon Wieseltier at a conference he helped organize under the auspices of YIVO, the New York–based Jewish cultural institution, in May 2003. The conference was called “Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West,” so apparently it was now no longer panicky to speak of such matters. And it brought together an impressive group of speakers.
    In any case, although out of town at that time I was impressed by the tape I later heard of the opening address by Wieseltier. He said a number of very important things, I thought. Some had been said before by others, but he said them especially well.
    One important thing he said is that those who consider that anti-Semitism is a problem only for Jews ought to reconsider: “If anti-Semitism is to vanish from the earth it will be from the transformation of non-Jewish rather than Jewish [ peoples]. . . . In this sense it is not a Jewish problem at all . . . it is a prejudice whose object is not its cause . . . if you wish to study racism, study whites, not blacks.” But he also said that the struggle against anti-Semitism is “a requirement of self-interest and of dignity” for Jews.
    I’m pleased to cede virtually the last word in this essay to the “Ethnic Panic” author, because it seemed to me he had learned much from the events of the year that followed his “Ethnic Panic” polemic—and perhaps from Ruth Wisse’s critique of it. 19
    But I wouldn’t say all non-Jews have abandoned that responsibility Leon Wieseltier spoke of, for anti-Semitism in our culture. I have been impressed by the seriousness with which some Christians and Muslims have addressed the question. Andrew Sullivan’s “Anti-Semitism Watch” on his weblog has been invaluable in spotlighting shameful incidents. As has Glenn Reynolds’s “InstaPundit” website and Jeff Jarvis’s “buzz-machine.” So have George Will’s columns and commentaries, and those of Stanley Crouch and Christopher Caldwell. Harold Evans and Oriana Fallaci were early and important voices. I’m sure there are more Christians on the Left who have spoken out, even if for some reason none come instantly to mind. (Unless you count Christopher Hitchens, who, while half Jewish—and only half Leftist now according to the more rigid ideologues—deserves credit for popularizing a brilliantly compressed polemical coinage for Jew-hating Middle Eastern terrorists: “Islamo-fascists.” As in, isn’t the Left supposed to
oppose
fascism?)
    But to return to the question of optimism I first raised in regard to Amos Oz. I wish I could find an upbeat way of concluding this essay. As I write this draft, two Turkish synagogues and a Jewish school in France have just been bombed. The world is discussing whether the