Conservatives Must Follow Bill Buckley’s Lead in Fighting Antisemitism

By Natan Ehrenreich

Wednesday, August 09, 2023

 

At last year’s National Conservatism Conference in Miami, I was among a small group of Orthodox Jews in attendance. More than enough of us were there to form daily prayer groups, and we even organized Torah study sessions. We felt nothing less than at home, and that was in large part thanks to the work of William F. Buckley Jr.

 

Coincidentally, the conference was held shortly before the 30th anniversary of Buckley’s great — but woefully underappreciated — book In Search of Anti-Semitism, in which he details his journey to purge the American conservative movement he built of antisemites.

 

In the past year, In Search of Anti-Semitism has again and again pressed to the front of my mind as prominent right-wingers continue to straddle — or trample over — the line between acceptable discourse and Jew-hatred. In October, Kanye West threatened on Twitter to “go death con 3 on Jewish people.” Candace Owens, the popular Daily Wire host, defended West: “Now, if you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic.”

 

West’s despicable comment and Owens’s preposterous defense bothered me only to a certain extent. West is clearly mentally ill, and, as much as Owens has a following in the conservative world, I do not consider her a serious person or an intellectual.

 

But I was taken aback by the recently leaked messages from conservative influencer and Claremont Institute alum Pedro Gonzalez. That Gonzalez was an ardent antisemite was not that surprising; he has publicly tweeted about “Rothschild Physiognomy.” But the sheer hatred displayed toward Jews, especially from someone who dwells in lofty intellectual circles, is nothing less than astounding. A few samples:

 

“Yeah like not every Jew is problematic, but the sad fact is that most are.”

 

“Fuentes does one good thing when he trolls Jews: He shows people how subversive they can be.”

 

“I will not allow Jewish people to hang the holocaust over Shakespeare’s neck. Enough cultural vandalism has happened because Jews want to remind everyone that the holocaust was a thing.”

 

What is going on here? How do such antisemitic figures rise to the heights of the conservative intellectual sphere? Was antisemitism always lurking in the shadows of the American Right? Buckley’s journey proves illuminating.

 

“Seven or eight children,” he recounts in In Search of Anti-Semitism,

 

in Sharon, Connecticut, among them four of my brothers and sisters, thought it would be a great lark one night in 1937 to burn a cross outside a Jewish resort nearby. That story has been told, and my biographer (John Judis) points out that I was not among that wretched little band. He fails to point out that I wept tears of frustration at being forbidden by senior siblings to go out on that adventure, on the grounds that (at age 11) I was considered too young.

 

From a young age, the Buckley children were inclined toward antisemitism if only to follow in the footsteps of their father, William F. Buckley Sr., whom Bill describes as trafficking in the popular antisemitism of the times. That the younger Buckley, over the course of his career, would laboriously endeavor to purge the Right of antisemitism is thus all the more remarkable.

 

Buckley describes how, from National Review’s earliest days, he struggled to balance his competing roles of gatekeeper and unifier. It was one thing that a few of NR’s very early contributors possessed less than a total affinity for Israel, but it was quite another that many NR writers also contributed to the American Mercury, a magazine that Buckley saw as descending into blatant antisemitism. He explains:

 

When it became clear, in 1957, that the direction the American Mercury was headed was anti-Semitic, I ruled, with the enthusiastic approval of my colleagues, that no writer appearing on the Mercury’s masthead, notwithstanding his own innocence on the subject, could also appear on National Review’s.

 

Norman Podhoretz, in an open letter to Buckley, describes this moment as a turning point in the history of American conservatism:

 

There can be no doubt that this was indeed a “generic step.” Before you took it, the American Right had provided a rather comfortable home for anti-Semitic ideas, attitudes, and feelings, even if many on the Right were themselves, as individuals, “innocent on the subject.” Thanks to you, however, a process of purgation, of cleansing, began.

 

But Buckley’s work was far from complete, and the threats of antisemitism hardly vanished when one opened the pages of National Review. In 1986, Buckley made the decision to “disassociate” NR from the opinions of one of its three senior editors, Joseph Sobran, because of comments that Buckley deemed unacceptable. (This was largely a symbolic gesture of disapproval, as NR still published Sobran’s columns.) Readers “wrote in . . . to wonder whether I had knuckled under to trendy pressures,” as he recalls. Sobran, after all, had simply expressed the type of “anti-Israel” comments that one routinely hears from “the Squad” today. But Buckley realized that Jew-hatred festers, growing steadily if not expunged.

 

Time would prove that Buckley’s actions didn’t go far enough. Sobran’s columns veered into the more overtly antisemitic as he began to muse repeatedly on relations between Jews and Christians, often painting the former as a threat to the latter. Eventually, National Review and Sobran parted ways (Buckley fired him in 1993), and Buckley’s reflections on the Sobran affair reveal a truth pertaining to the nature of antisemitism:

 

I dilate on the number of times I had told him about the minefield he was electing to kick up his heels in. And it is critical to recognize that we are talking about a minefield the editors of National Review substantially approve of: alarms that go off when people venture, inadvertently or by design, toward a dark and toxic house, whose identity becomes decipherable only after one has trod too far.

 

Now, one can quibble with Buckley on the exact moment in which antisemitism becomes decipherable, but the point stands that its evolution is often gradual. As Buckley realized, the exertion of leadership in eradicating antisemitism before it spreads is of paramount importance.

 

But why did Buckley take the task of purging the right of antisemitism so seriously? Why publish a nearly 200-page book solely dedicated to the topic? (Buckley also attacked Pat Buchanan for engaging in what he called “political antisemitism.”) Surely public perception played a role; Buckley, of course, did not want the movement he birthed to be associated with rank bigotry. But this is not a complete answer. Again, from Podhoretz’s letter: 

 

In my judgment — a judgment richly confirmed by “In Search of Anti-Semitism” — the only trouble you have with the Jewish problem is that it will not let you rest, and that you feel called upon over and over again to struggle with it and think about it and talk about it and write about it.

 

There may also have been a theological element to Buckley’s “struggle”: “What hangs in the balance in Israel,” he writes, “is the possible extermination of a historical tribe, elect of God. There cannot be ambiguity about the moral question of jeopardizing their survival.” One wonders whether today’s political Right can properly follow Buckley’s example when many no longer hold his religious views.

 

What’s most pertinent to our moment, though, is the fact that today’s popular conservatism has shifted closer to the paleoconservatism that Buckley thought relatively more likely to produce antisemites than the popular conservatism of the ’90s. As he notes in the book, the great Irving Kristol predicted this shift, and he was far less confident that Buckley’s crusade against conservative Jew-hatred was complete:

 

Irving Kristol acknowledges at least the possibility that the conservative movement will be overtaken in the years directly ahead not by nostalgia (he approves of this) but by reaction; and here he has in mind a relapse into those discarded doctrines that defaced the movement for so long, most conspicuously the nativism within which anti-Semitism prospered. . . . My own view of it is that this is not in prospect.

 

History, it seems, has proven Kristol right (though it would, of course, be a terrible mistake to label most paleoconservatives as inherently antisemitic). Nonetheless, Kristol also recognized that Buckley’s work fighting antisemitism, and the book he wrote detailing it, would retain enduring importance because of the example it set for future conservative leaders — who Kristol believed would inevitably grapple with paleoconservatism’s rise. As he wrote in his own open letter to Buckley:

 

[Antisemitism] is a symbolic issue, a signal light that holds this radical coalition together. It is, after all, a coalition with many internal stresses and contradictions. The Jews provide as they always do — a scapegoat, which is also a unifying force for people of various frustrations. I do not believe for a moment that these people really have it in mind to persecute Jews (though they may decide to persecute Israel as a proxy). But who knows what fires a few random sparks can set off? In any case, by importing into American conservatism a set of anti-Semitic innuendoes, they are debasing the conservative movement and robbing it, in the eyes of the public, of its political legitimacy. That is why I think, in the end, that Bill Buckley’s essay is so important. It is a forceful statement, by our leading American conservative, as to what kind of political body and what kind of political soul American conservatism is to possess.

 

Kristol’s description of the general paleoconservative disposition is, in my view, too harsh. But he was clearly correct that rightist antisemitism seems to disproportionately emanate from the paleoconservatives. The link, then, between specific segments of the Right and antisemitism persists. It is becoming rather obvious that if modern conservatism is to thrive, the work Buckley began must persist as well. Conservative leaders can look to In Search of Anti-Semitism for inspiration that such work can succeed, but also to see why it is necessary. Antisemitism, it seems, has not been vanquished within the American conservative movement. It’s time to go “in search” once again.