Right, Left and Centre, Part Ten: by Dave Jaffe: The Crtical Critic - Part Two

   The Critical Critic - Part Two by Dave Jaffe


    "You can drive yourself crazy reading Jewish history," the critical critic once said. Certainly he nearly drove himself crazy. He used to criticize Karl Marx, not because Marx was a revolutionary but because Marx who was the son of Jews, didn't like Jews. The critic surely held different ideas than the vast majority of Canadians, at least on some issues. As a result he often got into some intense arguments with people.
     The critic was a strong Zionist.  He went to a Jewish day school as a child, and immersed himself in Jewish history. He read books like 'They Were All Jews' which highlighted the lives of famous Jews. When he was in his mid-teens, the critic went with a group of other young Jewish students to Israel. He fell in love with this tiny country. He visited kibbutzim, listened closely to Israeli army people,  and wandered up and down the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, entranced by this new country which was only ten years old.
    The critic loathed Palestinian leaders like Yasir Arafat. He also had no time for Quebec sovereigntists.. "The man's a complete demagogue," the critic said of Pierre Bourgault, the leader of the sovereigntist Gathering for National Independence, an early 1960's forerunner of the Parti Quebecois. The critic knew the troubled history of Jews in Quebec. Jews and French Canadians often clashed. Anti-semitism flourished in Quebec from about 1900 to 1945. Power wielders like the theologian Lionel Groulx and French speaking Catholic priests put down Jews all the time.
     In the 1930's and 1940's, anti-Semitic French speaking crowds often attacked Jews in Montreal's east end. A young Pierre Elliot Trudeau wrote a play attacking Jews. Many French Canadians objected in both world wars to fighting Germany. Still, many French Canadians did go overseas in wartime and quite a few died on European battlefields.
    As the French Canadians modernized, many of them turned to the sovereigntist Parti Quebecois in the 1970's. Many Jews got scared. Thousands of English speaking Jews fled Montreal in the 1970's and 1980's. "They hate us," many Jews said once more about French Canadians. Mordecai Richler wrote a best selling book called 'O Canada, O Quebec' that was based on a series of articles he wrote for'The New Yorker'.
      Richler drew a straight line between the Quebec anti-semitism of the past like that of Lionel Groulx's, and the nationalsim of the Parti Quebecois. "They're both cut from the same cloth," Richler seemed to be saying. The critical critic agreed. In the mid-1960's he left Montreal and after some journeys he ended up in Toronto. He had no time for the Parti Quebecois.
     Wherever he went, the critic met people who loathed Jews or Israel or both. "When I lived in New York City," a Vanouver-based journalist told him, "all you had to do to insult a person is call them a Jew. That was a real put down." Another man in Vancouver, a Jew used to criticize Israel on the local co-op radio. The critic also turned against the New Left of the 1960's.  "All they do is put down Israel," he said. He thought John Lennon of the Beatles may have been an anti-Semite because Lennon kept calling Bob Dylan by his real name, namely 'Robert Zimmerman'.  The critic also had no time for feminism.