Melanie Phillips: "Tuvia Tenenbom Tells Truths That Liberals, Including Liberal Jews, Try to Airbrush Away"

"Humankind," said the poet, "cannot bear very much reality."

That goes double for the Jews:

The reason Tenenbom has such difficulty [getting his books published in English] is that Diaspora Jews, often outwardly seeming so confident, are in fact profoundly afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of the truth.

Tenenbom holds up a mirror they want to smash.

It shows them a reflection of the deep prejudice in English-speaking society against Israel and the Jews, a prejudice many Jews want to deny and that too many themselves dismayingly share.

One of the ugliest truths Tenenbom unmasks is the succor given to Jew-hatred by so many Jews on the Left. And Jews on the Left tend to be disproportionately represented in the publishing world.