Over the centuries, anti-Semitism has been many things — a religious conviction, an ideology, a national ethic, an unadorned expression of hate and, in more recent times, evidence of sturdy insanity. Now thanks to a New York Times interview with Alice Walker, it’s been reduced to merely a point of view. To cite the Times’s own motto, this interview was definitely not “news that’s fit to print.”
Walker, of course, is a highly praised novelist best known for “The Color Purple,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. Her renown is great, and it was no doubt on this basis that the Times interviewed her for its “By the Book” feature that runs in the Sunday Book Review. The trouble started with the first question.
“What books are on your nightstand?” the Times asked. The second book Walker named was “And the Truth Shall Set You Free” by the British conspiracy theorist David Icke. The book is so repellently anti-Semitic that Icke’s usual publisher wouldn’t touch it. Among other things, it endorses that hoary anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which blames evil Jews for much of the world’s ills.
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