to be considered intolerant. I mentioned to a Jewish friend that I’d rumbled Virginia Woolf’s anti-Semitism and had been thinking about how this stained her work—or didn’t. My friend replied matter-of-factly, “Well, if we give up the anti-Semites, we’ll have to give up everyone.” Why has Woolf’s anti-Semitism been forgotten? It’s far from the first thing we think of when we think of her. And it’s a small thing, a casual thing, a buried thing. As with T. S. Eliot and Edith Wharton and Dostoevsky, we think first and foremost of literary output. When confronted with their anti-Semitism, we think
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