JW: Serious.

RW: Serious, right. However, because they want to sell their product, because numbers count, because exposure matters, they find themselves having to add all this other material. It becomes, really, lighter and lighter as it moves into the body politic and into the cultural atmosphere. 

JW: So what you're talking about here is the consumerism which has affected religious life in general in America.

RW: Exactly.

JW: And there are some positive sides of that, in the sense of attunement to what resonates with people. I value that. Let's not just go through the motions, but let's try to find something that's meaningful to people. But at other points things get reduced to the lowest common denominator. Without naming names, a friend of mine, a rabbi of a congregation, speaks about how the latest incarnation of the prayer book is one that offends nobody. Well, if you offend nobody then maybe you're not saying anything. You know, anyone can feel comfortable there.

DJ: Is there a problem that it's very much part of the Jewish tradition, as you say, Ruth, to help oppressed minorities, non-Jews, Black Americans, the Civil Rights struggle? Jews played a very important part in all that. Now, we seem to be seeing something rather strange. I'm thinking of the debate over the Ground Zero mosque. Many liberal Jews seem to be identifying with Muslims, claiming that they are now the victims of Islamophobia and we have to stand up for them and defend them, completely ignoring the fact that there is a global jihad going on. Wherever they are in the world, Jews are under attack. Yet here in the United States and in England, there is an enormous identification with the enemy, as it were. I'm not suggesting for a second that all Muslims are enemies but there is something strange about this. Do you think it has something to do with the inability to have a clear sense of right and wrong, or good and evil?   

RW: Kenneth Levin, who is a psychoanalyst, applies the battered child syndrome to the battered Jewish people. No other nation has served so faithfully as a no-fail target. Anti-Semitism, as I try to point out repeatedly, is not discrimination and it's not prejudice. It should be distinguished from these two things. There isn't much prejudice against Jews in America, and there isn't really a tremendous amount of discrimination against them any more. And I'll take discrimination any day. Fine, so there's discrimination, so I'll build my own golf club or university. 

By contrast, anti-Semitism is the organisation of politics against the Jews and it is undeniably the most successful political ideology of modern times. It is huge and it has become more intense as a result of technological investment in its prosecution. It's much more widespread today and its major tribune is the United Nations. There's no other people that comes under attack to that degree, so part of the impulse to get out of harm's way is also magnified among many Jews. Other people can stop being what they are: if you don't feel very Italian you don't have to become anti-Italian. But if you suddenly feel yourself being assaulted as a Jew, you want to find your fellow Jews responsible for the aggression against them.