What September 11 Revealed
A writer looks back at a portent of the future.
Twenty-three years ago, not long after the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent Americans on September 11, The New York Times Magazine asked me if I would write about antisemitism.
They had noticed the explosion of Jew hatred that seemed to have ridden in on the contrails of the airplanes that jihadists had turned into weapons of mass destruction and aimed at the heart of American civilization. The editors wanted to know what I made of it.
At the time, I was grieving a national wound. The gaping pit where the Twin Towers had stood 110 stories high was still smoldering, and when the wind shifted the smoke reached me uptown. This was the worst attack on American soil since the founding of the country; I wasn’t eager to examine it with the binocular vision of double consciousness, but I’m grateful I was asked to write what I was seeing.
The piece I produced in reluctant haste is reprinted here as it appeared in the Times on November 4, 2001. There are things I would express differently now, but it captures something of the mood of that moment, along with my own astonishment at finding so much conspiratorial hatred of Jews and Israel braided into hatred of the United States, and the thinking of those who allowed themselves to believe that the United States had been punished for something Jews had done.
As the German sociologist Matthias Küntzel observed in 2002: “The legend, invented and circulated by the Hezbollah television station Al-Manar, that, following warnings from the Israeli secret service agency, the Mossad, four thousand Jews had not gone to work at the World Trade Center on September 11, reached untold millions around the world with lightning speed.” Indeed, it was a lie I encountered often writing my essay just weeks after the event.
Despite its inadequate, archaic name, antisemitism remains a useful tool for summoning aggrieved groups with disparate conspiracy theories, ideologies, and hatreds, including self-hatred, and binding them together.
True, those who put it on and wield it willingly, like the Ring of Power, tend to be destroyed in the end. But the end can take a long and catastrophic time. More than 50 million people died in the Second World War.
What has renewed its potency and warped utility, and to what ends? Since September 11, the answers have become a little clearer.
There is, alas, no nutshell version, though it would only help to read “Killing in the Name,” an essay by the historian Jeffrey Herf about radical Islamism, which “seeks to benefit from the pathos of Third Worldist rhetoric,” as Herf explains, though “its ideological themes have more in common with fascism and Nazism than with Marxism-Leninism.”
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has also written with great subtlety about the interplay of Marxism, nationalism, Islamism, and antisemitism in the Arab world.
There is also Küntzel’s short book, published in 2002, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. It was revised in 2007 with an introduction by Herf, whose own Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World is one of several indispensable books, and which has become even more relevant since October 7. The two appeared together earlier this year, along with Israeli historian Benny Morris, as part of a superb webinar “The Origins and Ideology of Hamas,” which is also a good place to start.
“While September 11 drove not only Israel but also many Jewish communities in Europe into unexpected political isolation,” Küntzel writes, “for the antisemites of Europe and the Arab world it served as a signal announcing the reawakening of antisemitism in its new globalized form.”
In other words, the Islamism that drove the attackers on September 11 was fueled not only by a murderous hatred of the West but by a genocidal hatred of Jews and Jewish autonomy—a belief system as central to their project of global domination as it was to the Nazis they absorbed it from.
In 2002, in a “Letter from al-Qa’ida to the Muslims and the Heroic Palestinian People,” Küntzel writes, “Osama bin Laden himself added his voice, linking the attacks in Israel and New York and praising them as ‘great achievements’ and ‘blessed holy war.’ ”
Today it is possible to see the outline of the October 7 massacre nested in the mass murders of September 11, and to recognize, in the justifications and celebration of October 7, the portents of future barbarism.
That is not all there is to see, of course.
Back in 2001, I wrote that my Jewish concerns do not put me at odds with our pluralistic society—it puts me in tune with it, since it is here of all places that I am free to express all my identities: American, Jewish, Zionist.
More than 20 years after the fact, the very word Zionist, which refers to the liberation movement of the Jewish people, whose right to self-determination in a portion of their historic homeland was realized and recognized in May 1948, has become, like the word Jew in older entries of English dictionaries, and still in some portions of the world, not merely an insult but an accusation, and, like Christ-killer, an invitation to the violence the libel suggests.
It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure.
It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as their 1988 Covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.
My old art history professor, Vincent Scully, spoke about the World Trade Center a few days after it was destroyed at a conference at Yale planned with a different purpose. “None of us has ever liked the World Trade Towers very much,” he said. And yet that was precisely what gave his tribute its power.
“When a very conspicuous building in our city, which we expect to outlive us, is destroyed by enemy action,” he said, “then it’s not only the lives of the people who are lost in it, but the lives of all of us, and the hope of future life which is cut away. And they know it. They know what they are doing.”
That was the voice I’d gone looking for—humane, reverential—when I stumbled on the video a few years ago, after reading that the great class he made famous, Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to Modern, was canceled in 2020 because students complained it was too Western.
I will end with what I wrote 23 years ago. I’m grateful to the editors who asked me at the time, and hope I never forget how important it is to express what you notice.
When I was growing up, my father would go to bed with a transistor radio set to an all-news station. Even without a radio, my father was attuned to the menace of history. A Jew born in Vienna in 1924, he fled his homeland in 1938; his parents were killed in the Holocaust.
I sometimes imagined my father was listening for some repetition of past evils so that he could rectify old responses, but he may just have been expecting more bad news. In any event, the grumbling static from the bedroom depressed me, and I vowed to replace it with music more cheerfully in tune with America. These days, however, I find myself on my father’s frequency. I have awakened to antisemitism.
I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer, I do not feel that prejudicial hiring practices will keep me out of a job, and I am not afraid that the police will come and take away my family. I am, in fact, more grateful than ever that my father found refuge in this country.
But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign.
Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.
I was born in 1963, a generation removed and an ocean away from the destruction of European Jewry. My mother was born here, so there was always half the family that breathed in the easy air of postwar America. You don’t have to read a lot of Freud to discover that the key to healthy life is the ability to fend off reality to a certain extent.
Deny reality too much, of course, and you’re crazy; too little and you’re merely miserable. My own private balancing act has involved acknowledging the fate of my murdered grandparents and trying to live a modern American life.
I studied English literature in college and in graduate school, where I toyed with a dissertation on Milton, a Christian concerned with justifying the ways of God to man. I dropped out of graduate school to become a writer, but I always felt about my life in America what Milton says of Adam and Eve entering exile—the world was all before me.
Living in New York, pursuing my writing life, I had the world forever all before me. I chose within it—I married and had a child. For 10 years I worked at a Jewish newspaper. But my sense of endless American possibility never left me—even working at a Jewish newspaper seemed a paradoxical assertion of American comfort.
My father’s refugee sense of the world was something that both informed me and that I worked to define myself against. I felt it was an act of mental health to recognize that his world was not my world and that his fears were the product of an experience alien to me. I was critical of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I didn’t want ancient European antisemitism enshrined on federal land. But now everything has come to American soil.
Recently, I read an interview with Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha—who was not only the representative in the United States of the prominent Cairo center of Islamic learning, al-Azhar University, but also imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York City.
The sheik, who until recently lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, explained that “only the Jews” were capable of destroying the World Trade Center and added that “if it became known to the American people, they would have done to Jews what Hitler did.”
This sentiment will be familiar to anyone who has been watching the news or reading the papers. In Kuwait, there were reports that New York rabbis told their followers to take their money out of the stock market before September 11; in Egypt, the Mossad was blamed for the attack.
It is easy talk to dismiss as madness, I suppose, but because so many millions of Muslims seem to believe it, and because airplanes actually did crash into the World Trade Center, words have a different weight and menace than they had before.
So does history, or rather the forces that shape history—particularly the history of the Jews. It would be wrong to say that everything changed on the eleventh of September for me. Like the man in the Hemingway novel who went bankrupt two ways—gradually and then suddenly—my awareness of things had also been growing slowly.
My father’s sister escaped in the 1930s from Vienna to Palestine—now, of course, called Israel—and I have a lot of family there. I grew up knowing that Israel, for all its vitality, was ringed with enemies; I knew how perilous and bleak life had become after the collapse of the Oslo peace process a year ago and how perilous and bleak it could be before that.
I knew, too, that works like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the Russian forgery about demonic Jewish power, have been imported into Arab society, like obsolete but deadly Soviet weapons.
By grafting ancient Christian calumnies onto modern political grievances, Arab governments have transformed Israel into an outpost of malevolent world Jewry, viewing Israelis and Jews as interchangeable emblems of cosmic evil.
So when the Syrian defense minister recently told a delegation from the British Royal College of Defense Studies that the destruction of the World Trade Center was part of a Jewish conspiracy, I wasn’t really surprised.
I’d gotten a whiff of this back in early September, while following the United Nations conference on racism and discrimination in Durban, South Africa, where the Arab Lawyers Union distributed booklets at the conference containing antisemitic caricatures of Jews with fangs dripping blood—a mere sideshow to the isolation of Israel and the equating of Zionism with racism that ultimately led to the United States’ withdrawal.
Singling out Israel made of a modern nation an archetypal villain—Jews were the problem and the countries of the world were figuring out the solution. This was hardly new in the history of the United Nations, but there was something so naked about the resurrected Nazi propaganda and the antisemitism fueling the political denunciations that I felt kidnapped by history. The past had come calling.
I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers.
Though public expressions of antisemitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers.
Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”
The cartoon manages to demonize Jews and trivialize the Holocaust simultaneously. Tom Gross, an Israel-based journalist, recently pointed out to me that a BBC correspondent, Hilary Andersson, declared that to describe adequately the outrage of Israel’s murder of Palestinian children one would have to reach back to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents—alluding to Herod’s attempt to kill Christ in the cradle by massacring Jewish babies.
After leading an editor from The Guardian on a tour of the occupied territories, Gross was astonished at the resulting front-page editorial in that highly influential British paper declaring that the establishment of Israel has exacted such a high moral price that “the international community cannot support this cost indefinitely.”
I understood that the editorial, speaking of the cost of the establishment of Israel—not of any particular policies—implied that Israel’s very right to exist is somehow still at issue. (One cannot imagine something similar being formulated about, say, Russia, in response to its battle with Chechen rebels, however much The Guardian might have disagreed with that country’s policies.)
And this reminded me inevitably of the situation of the Jews in 1940s Europe, where simply to be was an unpardonable crime.
I had somehow believed that the Jewish Question, which so obsessed both Jews and antisemites in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had been solved—most horribly by Hitler’s “final solution,” most hopefully by Zionism.
But more and more I feel Jews being turned into a question mark once again. How is it, the world still asks—about Israel, about Jews, about me—that you are still here? I have always known that much of the world wanted Jews simply to disappear, but there are degrees of knowledge, and after September 11 my imagination seems more terribly able to imagine a world of rhetoric fulfilled.
There are five million Jews in Israel and eight million more Jews in the rest of the world. There are one billion Muslims. How has it happened that Israel and “world Jewry,” along with the United States, is the enemy of so many of them?
To be singled out inside a singled-out country is doubly disconcerting. There are a lot of reasons why modernizing, secularizing, globalizing America, whose every decision has universal impact, would disturb large swaths of the world; we are, after all, a superpower.
Surely it is stranger that Jews, by their mere presence in the world, would unleash such hysteria.
And yet what I kept hearing in those first days in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center is that it was our support of Israel that had somehow brought this devastation down on us.
It was a kind of respectable variant of the belief that the Mossad had literally blown up the World Trade Center. It could of course be parried—after all, the turning point in Osama bin Laden’s hatred of the United States came during the Gulf War, when American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia.
But it had a lingering effect; it was hard to avoid a certain feeling that there was something almost magical about Israel that made it toxic for friends and foes alike.
This feeling will not go away, if only because our support of that nation makes it harder to maintain our coalition. Israel has somehow become an obstacle to war and an obstacle to peace simultaneously.
Lately, of course, bin Laden has added treatment of Palestinians to his list of grievances, and this may revive the sense that Israel bears some measure of responsibility. Large lies can be constructed out of smaller truths. The occupation of the West Bank by Israel, though it grew out of a war Israel did not want, has been a nightmare for the Palestinians and a disaster for Israel morally, politically, and spiritually.
It is a peculiar misery to feel this way and to feel, at the same time, that the situation has become a weapon in the war against Israel. Bin Laden would not want a Palestinian state on the West Bank, because he could not abide a Jewish state alongside it.
Neither could many of our allies in the Muslim world, who keep euphemistically suggesting that if only the “Mideast crisis” were resolved, terrorism would diminish. It has a plausible veneer—and indeed, it would be an extraordinary achievement if the Palestinians got a homeland and Israel got safe borders.
But since most of the players in the Middle East do not accept the existence of Israel, since “solving the Mideast crisis” would for them entail a modern version of Hitler’s final solution, the phrase takes on weird and even sinister overtones when it is blandly employed by well-intentioned governments calling for a speedy solution.
And this Orwellian transformation of language is one of the most exasperating and disorienting aspects of the campaign against Israel. It has turned the word peace into a euphemism for war.
I grew up in a post-Holocaust world. For all the grim weight of that burden, and for all its echoing emptiness, there was a weird sort of safety in it too. After all, the worst thing had already happened—everything else was aftermath. In the wake of the Holocaust, American antisemitism dissipated, the church expunged old calumnies.
The horror had been sufficient to shock even countries like the Soviet Union into supporting a newly declared Jewish state. Israel after 1967 was a powerful nation—besieged, but secure. American Jews were safe as houses.
I am not writing this essay to predict some inevitable calamity but to identify a change of mood. To say aloud that European antisemitism, which made the Holocaust possible, is still shaping the way Jews are perceived; Arab anti-Israel propaganda has joined hands with it and found a home in the embattled Muslim world.
Something terrible has been born. What happened on September 11 is proof, as if we needed it, that people who threaten evil intend evil. This comes with the dawning awareness that weapons of mass destruction did not vanish with the Soviet Union; the knowledge that, in fact, they may pose a greater threat of actually being used in this century, if only in a limited fashion, is sinking in only now.
That a solution to one century’s Jewish problem has become another century’s Jewish problem is a cruel paradox. This tragedy has intensified to such a degree that friends, supporters of Israel, have wondered aloud to me if the time has come to acknowledge that the Israeli experiment has failed, that there is something in the enterprise itself that doomed it.
This is the thinking of despair. I suppose one could wonder as much about America in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, since many American values will now be challenged and since, in fighting a war, you always become a little like your enemy, if only in accepting the need to kill.
I grew up at a time when sex education was considered essential but what might be called war education, what a country must do to survive, was looked upon with a kind of prudish horror. I suppose that will now change. In any event, Israel has been at war for 50 years. Without that context, clear judgment is impossible, especially by those accustomed to the Holocaust notion that Jews in war are nothing but helpless victims—a standard that can make images to the contrary seem aberrant.
I have a different way of looking at the Israeli experiment than my friends who wonder about its failure. It is connected to how I look at the fate of European Jewry. When the Jews of Europe were murdered in the Holocaust, one might have concluded that European Judaism failed—to defend itself, to anticipate evil, to make itself acceptable to the world around it, to pack up and leave.
But one could also conclude in a deeper way that Christian Europe failed—to accept the existence of Jews in their midst, and it has been marked ever since, and will be for all time, with this blot on its culture. Israel is a test of its neighbors as much as its neighbors are a test for Israel. If the Israeli experiment fails, then Islam will have failed, and so will the Christian culture that plays a shaping role in that part of the region.
I am fearful of sounding as though I believe that the Holocaust is going to replay itself in some simplified fashion—that my childhood fantasy for my father is true for me, and it is I who am straining to hear Hitler’s voice break over the radio. I do not. Israel has a potent, modern army. But so does the United States, and it has proved vulnerable to attack, raising other fears. The United States spans a continent, and its survival is not in doubt. But experts who warn us about American vulnerability refer to areas the size of entire states that will become contaminated if a nuclear reactor is struck by a plane. Israel is smaller than New Jersey.
I am aware that an obsession with the Holocaust is seen as somehow unbecoming and, when speaking of modern politics, viewed almost as a matter of bad taste if not bad history. I do not wish to elide Israel’s political flaws by invoking the Holocaust. But that very reluctance has been exploited and perverted in a way that makes me disregard it.
“Six million Jews died?” the mufti of Jerusalem, a Palestinian Authority appointee, remarked last year. “Let us desist from this fairy tale exploited by Israel to buy international solidarity.” (The utterance is particularly egregious because the mufti’s predecessor paid an admiring visit to Hitler in 1941.)
The demonizing language that is used about Israel in some of the European press, and about Jews in the Arab press, is reminiscent of Europe in the 1930s. I grew up thinking I was living in the post-Holocaust world and find it sounds more and more like a pre-Holocaust world as well.
Ten years ago, I interviewed Saul Bellow in Chicago and in the course of the interview asked him if there was anything he regretted. He told me that he now felt, looking back on his career, that he had not been sufficiently mindful of the Holocaust. This surprised me because one of his novels, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, is actually about a Holocaust survivor.
But Bellow recalled writing The Adventures of Augie March—the grand freewheeling novel that made his reputation—in Paris in the late 1940s. Holocaust survivors were everywhere, Bellow told me, and, as a Yiddish speaker, he had access to the terrible truths they harbored. But, as Bellow put it, he was not in the mood to listen. “I wanted my American seven-layer cake,” he told me. He did not wish to burden his writing at that early moment in his career with the encumbering weight of Jewish history. Augie March begins, exuberantly, “I am an American.”
I, too, want my American seven-layer cake, even if the cake has collapsed a little in recent weeks. There is no pleasure in feeling reclaimed by the awfulness of history and in feeling myself at odds with the large universalist temper of our society. Thinking about it makes me feel old, exhausted, and angry.
In the Second World War, American Jews muted their separate Jewish concerns for the good of the larger struggle to liberate Europe. I understand the psychological urge to feel in sync with American aims. But Israel sticks out in this crisis as European Jewry stuck out in World War II, forcing a secondary level of Jewish consciousness, particularly because the anti-Zionism of the Arab world has adopted the generalized antisemitism of the European world.
The danger to America, which has already befallen us, and the danger to Israel, which so far remains primarily rhetorical, are, of course, connected. And though it is false to imagine that if Israel did not exist America would not have its enemies, people making the link are intuiting something beyond the simple fact that both are Western democracies.
In Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery, Bernard Lewis points out that after Christians reconquered Spain from the Muslims in the fifteenth century, they decided to expel the Jews before the Muslims.
The reason for this, Lewis explains, is that although the Jews had no army and posed far less of a political threat than the Muslims, they posed a far greater theological challenge. This is because Jews believed that adherents of other faiths could find their own path to God.
Christianity and Islam, which cast unbelievers as infidels, did not share this essential religious relativism. The rabbinic interpretation of monotheism, which in seeing all human beings as created in God’s image recognized their inherent equality, may well contain the seeds of the very democratic principles that the terrorists of September 11 found so intolerable.
Is it any wonder that in the minds of the terrorists and their fundamentalist defenders, Americans and Jews have an unholy alliance? Expressing my separate Jewish concerns does not put me at odds with our pluralistic society—it puts me in tune with it, since it is here of all places that I am free to express all my identities—American, Jewish, Zionist.
And if Jews kicked out of Spain clung, at peril of death, to a religion with such an ultimately inclusive faith in the redeemable nature of humanity, who am I to reject that view? Perhaps the optimistic American half of my inheritance isn’t at odds with the darker Jewish component after all.
In this regard, the double consciousness that has burdened my response to our new war need not feel like a division. On the contrary, it redoubles my patriotism and steels me for the struggle ahead.
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