Podhoretz, Vidal Feud

Jody Powell, in his column (Editorial Pages, May 22) about the Gore Vidal-Norman Podhoretz controversy, treats the affair as a joke--naughty children throwing mud balls. Another columnist, Edwin Yoder, sees Vidal’s article (The Nation, March 22) as of the largest general interest; detects no anti-Semitism but merely “hard-edged teasing”; associates himself almost completely with Vidal’s charges, and welcomes them as upholding the right to criticize Israel without being labeled anti-Semitic.

At bottom, Vidal’s principal charge against his immediate targets, Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, is that they are staunch supporters of Israel; but since this is also true of the large majority of American Jews, his targets are obviously far more numerous. What then is Vidal actually saying about such Jews?

That they constitute an “Israeli Fifth Column Division”; that they are really not loyal to America, but only to Israel, and yet “. . . stay on among us in order to make propaganda and raise money for Israel”; that Jews belong to a “. . . predatory people . . . busy (in the Middle East) stealing other people’s land in the name of an alien theocracy”; that Jewish Americans who support Israel are “. . . lobbyist(s) for a foreign power” and therefore should register with the Justice Department; that since their country is Israel and not America, they are here not as citizens but as guests, and therefore “. . . that tact would require a certain forbearance when it comes to the politics of the host country.”

Any mature adult with normal intelligence who reads Vidal’s diatribe, and can then say it does not represent an exercise in anti-Semitism, and a quite virulent one at that, tells us more about his own standards and attitudes than about Vidal’s.

RAYMOND MARCUS

Los Angeles