A Guide for the Bedevilled
By
MR. HECHT, never one to spare the invectives, lets fly with a barrage that bares in all its ugliness the problem of anti-Semitism and anti-Semites. Despite his vitriolic and violent approach to the subject, Mr. Hecht has written a sincere book. He takes anti-Semitism personally and emotionally. The result is a stimulating volume, but one, unfortunately, that sheds little new light on the subject.
Skimming through the history of the Jews, Mr. Hecht finds that the Jew is not the cause of anti-Semitism but its victim; he explains that it has never mattered whether the Jew tried to make himself into a likeness pleasing to the non-Jew; it mattered not whether the Jew was rich or poor, quiet-mannered or noisy, radical or conservative: anti-Semitism always seemed to flourish.
In seeking for an answer, Mr. Hecht examines a number of theories: that anti-Semitism is the manifestation of an inferiority complex on the part of those who practice it; that anti-Semitism is a crime and anti-Semites criminals; that Jews are egotists. As for the German people, Mr. Hecht says that they are, with a very few exceptions, cold-blooded murderers and that the only way to cure their criminal tendencies is to fence off the whole nation and let it destroy itself — hardly a practical suggestion.
Mr. Hecht sees little likelihood that anti-Semitism will disappear. He points out that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1822 discovered the cause of puerperal fever and asked in his most charming manner that the medical profession investigate his theory. But neither the public nor the medical profession would listen to him, and it was not until a hundred years later that Dr. Holmes’s theory was finally accepted. Mr. Hecht points out that if scientists and mankind in general are so callous about death in childbirth, how can the Jew expect the world to worry about his fate!
The only solution suggested by Mr. Hecht ‘s book is that the non-Jews must recognize anti-Semitism as a virulent disease for which they must find a cure, for their own protection. Scribner. $2.50.
GEORGE W. JOEL
GEORGE W. JOEL