You’re unfortunately right about how, over time, the accusation seems to overpower virtually everything else in a person’s legacy of work.

I was once having a conversation with a liberal friend of mine, and I brought up a reference to H.L. Mencken in making a point about the inadequacy of democracy or some such. He immediately interjected “Wasn’t he some Nazi sympathizer / Anti-Semite?”

Boom. Done. I sat there stunned that now, in order to raise awareness of Mencken’s superb observations and insights, I first had to somehow neutralize the perception that he was a monster. Very depressing.

@JBraunstein: “…while simultaneously increasing real animus towards Jews borne from the resentment of this extortionist tactic.”

You think so? I think most people appreciate that neo-connery isn’t representative of American Jewish opinion. Almost the opposite, even.

What really stings is, in a few years when this stuff fades away, someone will say “Andrew Sullivan used to say…” and his friend will stop him and say, “wasn’t that guy anti-Semitic?” And the whiff of that will stop most people from continuing. It’s Sullivan’s FUTURE reputation that is effected most, not his current one (where everyone obviously can see through this charade).

It’s reach is inescapable; If you say anything, express any opinion that could also hypothetically intersect somehow with the opinions of someone who is actually anti-semitic, no matter how coincidental or non-convergent, you lose the benefit of the doubt. “Hamas also thinks the sky is blue…Anti-Semite!”

The very label is poison, it’s effect on social relationships like a disgusting venereal disease everybody knows about. Confronting the abusers of the term on their callousness and dishonesty is, in itself, cause to have the label thrust upon you.

The sad irony is that a small cadre of vindictive and paranoid Jews have managed to both diminish the meaning of the accusation by diluting it to an absurd degree, while simultaneously increasing real animus towards Jews borne from the resentment of this extortionist tactic.

Ridicuously, Leon accuses Sullivan of dividing Jews into good and bad categories, a practice with a dark and sordid history, as he loftily reminds us. Okay. Should we consider Jews as a mass collectivity? That seems anti-semitic. Well, how else are we supposed to divide them? Are Jews uniformly good? That seems improbable. Are they uniformly bad? That seems improbable and prejudicial to boot. Well, what then? Should we just decline to level any moral judgement on their opinions at all? That seems relativistic, quite untrue to the righteous and missionary tone of his magazine. Incidentally, the style of sterile argumentation is not one typically associated with Leon Wieseltier. For good reason.

To have political convictions is to make a moral statement. Effectively, you are stating that people who hold views wildly different from yours are deeply mistaken or, perhaps, even morally obtuse. This is what makes them convictions. Unsuprisingly, members of other groups are going to divide themselves accordingly: some will agree with you, some not so much. How can any person find this even remotely controversial? I guess only if they are the type of person who reads bigotry in the use of the word “wings”. What, does Leon think Andrew is comparing Jews to a predatory fowl?

I could go on, but whats the point.

The neoconservatism that the likes of Krauthammer and Goldfarb espouse is an inverted Trotskyism. As Jacob Heilbrunn shows, it emerged from a largely Jewish milieu, though most American Jews aren’t buying.

American Jews today are part of the academic, business and political élites, in disproportion to their numbers. Like every other group (Southerners, Catholics, etc.), they often (though not always) bring certain baggage with them. It’s time to grow up and discuss such matters without exaggerated hostility or sensitivity. A grown-up discussion would require the defenders neoconnery and Israeli policy to get to merits. Alas, it’s far easier just to mutter “1938″ and view with alarm.