How media companies are using the Internet to make anti-semitism respectable

Walt’s readers live through his posts and feed off of the legitimacy bestowed on him by mainstream American cultural institutions—Harvard, which employs him; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which published his book, and FP.com and The Washington Post Company, which host his blog. Walt and his anti-Israel blogging colleagues have become the respectable face of Jew-baiting. They’re the cesspool’s avatars.

There was a time when American publications could easily ward off the fringe population of semi-literate paranoids and shut-ins who seek admission to mainstream American intellectual life by writing crazy letters. Editors of magazines like The New Yorker didn’t particularly care what their readers had to say (the magazine had no letters section for many years), so long as they kept renewing their subscriptions, and a magazine’s prestige seemed proportionate to the lack of interest it evinced in audience feedback. Being kept in the margins, or shoved there, is the other side of the homespun success story, and no one ever has written better about thwarted American aspiration than Nathanael West. His novel Miss Lonelyhearts is about a newspaper advice columnist driven to despair over the anguished longings of his miserable readers; West’s Day of the Locust is about fringe Hollywood characters who never make the big time, a book that ends in a riot and Los Angeles in flames. What we’re seeing now on the blogs is the obscene marriage of West’s two greatest, and apparently visionary, works: Miss Lonelyhearts’s readers have repossessed the media and redeemed their self-pity and resentment with lead roles in American intellectual life—which they are intent on burning to the ground. Yet even West never dreamed that the proprietors would provide the matches.

“Walt is a throwback to the 1930s,” says Goldberg. “In the ’30s the isolationists rode the Jews as a hobby horse. They tried very hard to marginalize American citizens of the Jewish faith by questioning their loyalty. These guys don’t even understand what ancient terror they’re tapping into. What’s original, what makes this period alarming, is that The Washington Post Company would give a Jew-baiter a platform.”