Those Who Forget the Past Read Online Free PDF Page B

neither was aware of the omission. The man at LexisNexis investigated and reported back that it appeared to be a technological glitch, not a deliberate political or ideological erasure. The dream passage was preserved on one
New Yorker
website version of the piece (not the “printer-friendly” one) but not on LexisNexis. The LexisNexis man said he believed that because the dream was printed in smaller type in
The New Yorker,
it may have dropped out in the scan that transferred it to the LexisNexis database. So it appears to be an inadvertent omission. Inadvertent, but emblematic of the way that dream of slaughter—and the widespread sentiment it spoke for—had dropped off the scan of discourse on the question.
    When I wrote the first draft of this introduction, it had not been restored. Which allowed anyone reading the piece to avoid facing an unsavory truth. Now it’s back again on LexisNexis; the murderous dream has been restored, although of course in reality it was never gone.
    But the two versions of the Goldberg story, the one with and the one without the dream, represented two versions of the world—two ways of looking at the world, and looking away.
    4) SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE
    Those two ways of looking at the world: I suppose that’s what I evoked—even if it wasn’t what I set out to do—when I touched off a controversy by putting into print a phrase that some found transgressive, disturbing, and virtually taboo: “a second Holocaust.”
    I had set out to write something about the revival of European anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. The kind of anti-Semitism that could feature a child wearing a mock “suicide-bomber” explosive bandolier in a “peace” march. And the emerging phenomenon of “Holocaust inversion,” as Melanie Phillips called it, the pernicious rhetorical device in which Nazi imagery is used to depict Jews. There was Tom Paulin’s famous formulation “the Zionist SS”—merely the most egregious. Holocaust inversion took Holocaust denial one step further: the Jews were not victims, not even “fake” victims, as the deniers contended; the Jews were now portrayed as the perpetrators of the kinds of crimes that had been committed against them.
    In any case, the fact that I uttered the phrase “second Holocaust” was, in truth, inadvertent, a Web-surfing happenstance. Safe in America, yet suffering with each new report of a “suicide bombing” in Israel, one morning I followed a link from the popular “InstaPundit” website to a site I’d never visited before, one operated by a Canadian political commentator, David Artemiw.
    On that day, he happened to quote a deliberately shocking passage from a Philip Roth novel, the 1993 work called
OperationShylock
. It’s a novel that is set mainly in Israel, in 1988, during the first Intifada, and begins with a comic doppelgänger premise that turns—lurches at times—into moments of terrifying seriousness. (And ends in, of all places, the back room of Barney Greengrass.) I don’t want to anticipate the excerpt published herein. But in sum, the “real” Philip Roth hears that an impostor calling himself “Philip Roth” is ensconced in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem giving talks about an ideology he calls Diasporism.
    This is the belief that exile, Diaspora, the historic dispersion of the Jews, had by that year become a better solution to the problem of Jewish survival than their dangerous “concentration,” so to speak, in the State of Israel. “The Diasporist” argues that the in-gathering to Israel, while it served a purpose in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, now threatens to lead to an unthinkable catastrophe. Unthinkable but not unspeakable. He speaks it. He calls the dread possibility “a second Holocaust.”
    The phrase comes in the context of an argument