A Look at Cowards on Both Sides in USC Pogrom

When a group of USC students attacked a largely Jewish fraternity house last month, shouting anti-Semitic slogans and scrawling racist epithets on the building, they were conducting a pogrom. It was a model of its kind--the Jews taking refuge behind the walls of their abode, their attackers emboldened to a higher state of frenzy by the lack of Jewish response.

Lest the reader think pogrom too strong a word, since no Jew was even hurt, consider the proposition that inflicting harm is the easiest part of a pogrom. The hardest part is persuading normally civilized people to turn themselves into a mayhem-minded mob and attack their neighbors.

Why Jews? The usual arguments are contradictory: The Jews are commies; the Jews are plutocrats. The Jews refuse to assimilate; the Jews horn in where they are not wanted. The Jews are vulgar; the Jews are culture hounds and have taken over the arts.

The Jews are, of course, all of these. And none of them. The truth is more prosaic. The Jews are attacked because they are easy prey. Their attackers know in their hearts that the chance of the Jews offering serious resistance is remote. They are tailor-made for that dark spot in the human heart, the tiny recess where resides the malignant instinct to hang the nigger, punch the fag, kick the cat, crush the cricket underfoot.

Should the reader dismiss this argument as being too simplistic in an age of psychoanalysis, economic determinism, religious fundamentalism and geopolitics, consider this: The Gypsies of Europe were never accused of being international bankers, communist conspirators, authors of a “Protocols of the Elders of Gypsydom,” revolting parvenues or winners of Greek Week competitions. Yet they were rounded up and gassed. Because, like the Jews, the Gypsies were easy to kill.

The reluctance to resist is deeply rooted in the psyche of the diaspora Jews. It has its genesis in the crushing defeat that the Roman Empire dealt the Jewish people, their state and their religion. Paradoxically, only the Germans gave the Romans as much trouble. Time and again the Jews rose up against the Empire in Tet-like offensives. Judea was very nearly Rome’s Vietnam. The cost was so high, the casualties so heavy, that the Roman commander in a report to the emperor deliberately omitted the usual preamble, “I and my legions are well.” In the end the empire prevailed, not only because of legendary Roman grit and Roman technology but also because the Romans had no public opinion to contend with.

Had we Jews not fought back, it was argued later, had we submitted as did the Britons, Gauls, Greeks, Spaniards, Egyptians and Syrians, we would have survived as a nation. To fight back and kill only drives the enemy to further frenzy, to kill even more of us. So while the Gentiles extracted two eyes for an eye, three teeth for a tooth and four fingers for none, the Jews turned the other cheek.

Consider this, too: Can one imagine that gaggle of callow vandals, the elite of the USC campus, attacking a black or Latino fraternity?

No, the Jews were not attacked by the junior Klansmen in clean underwear of Kappa Sigma and Pi Beta Phi because they were Jews. They were attacked because they could be attacked. They were attacked because the diaspora Jews of Sigma Alpha Mu behaved like cowards, but no more than their tormentors did.