Jewish Solidarity Does Not Constitute 'Hysteria'

To the editors:

I have two problems with the column by Nader R. Hasan ’02 (“Patriotism and Its Discontents,” March 13). First, Hasan criticizes Jews who he claims support Israel with unconditional “hysteria.” However, he fails to mention that the population of Jews in the world is miniscule and that Jews were the target of the greatest genocide in world history. Because there are so few Jews left in the world today, maybe we cling to solidarity because we have to. Because our existence depends on it and has depended on it for five millenia.

Additionally, Hasan compares the patriotism of Americans and Israelis to that of the Nazis and the Rwandans. At first I thought that this was a joke, but then he qualified the comparison by claiming that “it is unlikely that either Israel or America will ever commit crimes on this level of inhumanity.” It’s one thing to suggest that democracies thrive on their citizens’ right to question and challenge authority. It’s another to infer that strong patriotism could potentially lead to the support of mass murder. Last I checked, the United States is a democracy and the Nazis were fascists.

H. Joshua Glassman ’02

March 13, 2002