Accidents of Influence: Writing as a Woman and a Jew in America

Norman Mailer's Holocaust-Poisoned Jews

Norman Mailer~s Holocaust-Poisoned Jews In the matter of anti-Semitic portraits, Shakespeare's Shylock is probably as sympathetic and enlightened as we can hope to have. Shakespeare's Jew is not demonic: he is governed by cause and effect. His poisoned soul has its reasons. Shylock suffers at the hands of gentiles, and when he finds his own hand strengthened he becomes the horror we know-demander of his pound of flesh. Four centuries later American Jews are being warned that the Holocaust has hardened Jewish hearts: Jews are in danger of losing compassion, neglecting the suffering of others, and seeking revenge against the world. This view, which effects a kind of wholesale transformation of Jews into Shylocks, assures that those who were victims once can count on being victims again. First because of the blows taken, second because of what the blows are said to have done. Once again, goes this libel, Jews have poisoned the wellsprings of fellow feeling. The accuser this time is Norman Mailer, who takes the matter right into the presidential campaign. * If Jews don't nominate the Reverend Jesse Jackson for President it's not because they've thought anything through, but rather because "Hitler succeeded in smashing ... generosity of spirit." As Mailer sees it, the souls of Jews may be so poisoned that they will dodge the opportunity to vote for Jackson, who will "give young black people the confidence that American society exists also for them" and "open a great counterattack against the metastases of the drug problem." Mailer indicts Jews for being narrowly hung up on a few Jewish concerns vis-a-vis Jackson: the "Hymietown" insult (Mailer reminds us that Jackson apologized); the connections to Farrakhan 'f Op-Ed, New York Times, April 18, 1988. 77 78 A HOLOCAUST MENTALITY and Arafat (though Jackson has repudiated neither one, Mailer calls us to appreciate that Jackson has dissociated from both); and the disquieting stance on Israel (Mailer consoles with a rotundity of prose: a candidate for president of the United States carries little weight "against the multitudinous labyrinths and floodgates of ... history"). Mailer looks for transcendence of these minor matters. He develops his thesis: "Since World War II, I have lived, like every other Jew, with the fundamental ill of the Holocaust. Hitler succeeded in wiping out more than one-third of the Jewish population in the world, and upon the rest of us he left a fearful curse: the legacy of Nazism, now in its fifth decade, is still there to poison one's finer moral substance." Leaving aside the question of whether this is the first time Mailer has used the word "us" in connection with Jews, we can move to a more urgent question: Is it this determinism, this poisonous reaction-formation, that prevents the finer moral substance of Jews from voting for Jackson for president? Or is it something fresh and powerful, like thought? Mailer yearns back to the time when "the welfare of all the people of the world came before our own [that is, Jews'] welfare." After we fight free of the fumes of Mailer's fantasy, let us ask him this question: What religion (let alone political system) counsels us to love our neighbor better than ourselves, or "before" ourselves? As well as ourselves is good enough for Hillel and Jesus. If Mailer offers counsel not of this world and not of any angels' world either, what world are we in? Why-back in his old one of "The White Negro," famously described by him in an essay published in Dissent in 1957 and reprinted two years later in Advertisements for Myself. It was there that Mailer first swept from Holocaust to "Negro": "Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps...." The only right responder for Mailer was that existential harrower of hell, the hipster. The hipster's unconventional wisdom derived from the Negro, in whom "psychopathy is most prevalent .... And in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you, the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom...." Norman Mailer's Holocaust-Poisoned Jews 79 From there the sainted soul of the hipster soared upward, like St. Anthony's when he was among the temptations. As then, so now. Thirty years later, Mailer is swinging round again with another apocalypse, another salvational theory out of the Negro. Then it was the generic Negro, from which...