Death Camp or Gulag...?

New York City

In his March 28 review, "Jews Without Borders," Daniel Lazare seems to misunderstand my book The Orientalist (as well as the novel Ali and Nino) while using both as a proxy to vent his apparent resentment at The New Yorker, from which he supposes I have "absorbed all too well" my political line. In Lazare's personal media conspiracy, he must imagine me and David Remnick and a roomful of editors sitting around a table--or perhaps a graveyard at midnight--hatching our heinous plot to impose "moderation" on the world. First, let me plead guilty to believing that "the truth lies always in the middle, and that extremists of the left and right are brothers under the skin." But let me also break the news to Lazare that I come by my anti-extreme politics on my own.

Though I think most Nation readers will see through his odd attacks, the insinuation that I prefer Nazis to Communists is deeply offensive. (It's also illogical, since he has my number as a man of the middle.) As the introduction to this book makes plain, my interest in fascist Europe--and the unique character of Lev Nussimbaum--comes out of the fact that most of my family were wiped out by the Nazis. My mother herself barely escaped this fate.

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