Great article... I like that scrap:
I myself grew up among the traditional attitudes of the English lower classes. These were best expressed by the late Kingsley Amis, who was once asked by an interviewer whether he was antisemitic. "Very, very mildly," replied Amis. Pressed to elaborate, he offered this: "Well, when I'm watching the credits roll at the end of a TV program, I say to myself: 'Oh, there's another one.'" That is about the temperature of antisemitism I knew as a child: barely detectable. (I have, of course, already outraged a number of American readers, devotees of the proposition that anyone who makes the merest remark about the Jews that is not absolutely, irreproachably positive, is secretly plotting to massacre them. I acknowledge this with a resigned sigh. One thing you learn, writing for the public, is that anything whatsoever that you say about the Jews will be seen as virulently antisemitic to somebody, somewhere.) |
