The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg is the kind of leading American Zionist who likes to monitor the pro-Israel sentiments of the wider community. If you aren’t sufficiently in love with Israel, watch out. It’s a depressing sign of ethnocentrism.
But I have to agree with one of his latest posts about how to deal with mad and often racist emails (of which I get my fair share):
I say, post them. Sometimes. Jeff Weintraub explains why he doesn’t want to activate a comments section on his blog. He cites some of the crazier stuff I find in my in-box as proof of the uselessness of openness, and writes, “I suspect that Goldberg isn’t sharing the more demented, illiterate, and morally obscene kinds of e-mail attacks he gets.” Generally, I do post some of the most demented material. The letters I don’t read, and don’t post, are letters like the one that came in the other day that began, “Dear fucking douchebag Zionist,” which was followed by nine (!) paragraphs of I-don’t-know-what, because I stopped reading once I counted the paragraphs. But I do enjoy letters from Nazis, mainly because of their issues with spelling. The people who really scare me are the Nazis who use proper grammar.