Over the weekend, I was alerted to a tweet posted by Max Blumenthal, who announced that “.@thenation decided @eric_alterman’s promotion of far-rightist painting me as anti-Semite ‘did not meet…standards’.” The tweet was accompanied by a screenshot showing an “Editor’s Note” that can be found under one of Eric Alterman’s recent posts at his regular Nation blog. The note reads: “This blog post originally included a passage linking to a paper by Petra Marquardt-Bigman titled ‘Another Milestone for the Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism: The New America Foundation and Max Blumenthal’s Goliath.” After a review, we concluded that this paper did not meet our standards as source material and so the link and the passage were removed by the editors.” The cached version of the webpage reveals that the deleted passage read: “And here is a brand new sixty-three page paper, I kid you not, called ‘Another Milestone For the Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism: The New American Foundation and Max Blumenthal’s Goliath.’ It is by someone with whom I am unfamiliar, Petra Marquardt-Bigman, and published by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. It deals with the Nation Books publication named above and the reaction it inspired. I could not bring myself to read it in its entirety but perhaps someone else can and let me know how it turns out. Enjoy….” The Nation’s very public rebuke of its own longtime columnist, who is also Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, amounts to a stunning act of censorship. But it is perhaps not so hard to imagine what might have driven the Nation’s editor to such a downright desperate attempt to censor the paper’s own widely respected contributor: The Nation provided Blumenthal a platform to promote his book – which was published by Nation Books – and also allowed Blumenthal to defend himself against Alterman’s scathing criticism of “Goliath.” Being so heavily invested in Blumenthal’s book, it must have been uncomfortable for the Nation to be confronted with a detailed documentation showing not only that Blumenthal himself made the strongest case for criticism of his book as anti-Semitic by openly embracing a review that praised him for depicting Israel as the Nazi Germany of our time, but that Blumenthal’s demonization of the Jewish state as uniquely evil also won him profuse praise from neo-Nazis, white supremacists and assorted other racists or conspiracy theorists. Indeed, since the paper was published last February, I have come across additional material that illustrates Blumenthal’s popularity wherever there are Jew-haters. But while Blumenthal took the trouble to recycle his “reporting” for sites like Mondoweiss and the Electronic Intifada into a book that depicted Israel as the Nazi Germany of our time, he has recently found it more useful to seize upon the monstrous atrocities committed by the Islamic State to demonize Israel as #JSIL, i.e. the Jewish version of the terror group. As Tablet Magazine’s Yair Rosenberg put it so pithily when he recently tweeted sarcastic instructions on “How to be an anti-Semite: 1) Pick one of the great evils of your time (e.g. Nazism, ISIS) – 2) Equate it with the Jews or their state – 3) Tweet.” It is therefore little wonder that by now, Blumenthal has acquired a reputation that prompted prominent German politicians of the left last week to oppose granting him a platform at respected venues like Berlin’s Volksbühne theater and the German Parliament; both events were eventually cancelled. There may be a connection between the rejection Blumenthal experienced in Berlin and the decision of The Nation to censor Alterman’s mention of the LDB paper, since Alterman’s post is dated October 20, the cached version that includes the censored paragraph is from October 26, and Blumenthal reported the deletion only on November 8, when he already knew about the cancellation of his presentation at the German parliament and ongoing efforts to also cancel his appearance at the Volksbühne. Since the Nation’s editor cited the paper’s “standards” as a reason for censoring Alterman, it is noteworthy that Blumenthal is not known for taking the trouble to respond to his critics with substantive arguments. After the publication of my paper, he addressed misogynist remarks to me on Twitter, and he has denigrated Alterman ever since his critical comments on Goliath; most recently he labeled him an “ethnic supremacist.” As little as Alterman will feel the need to defend himself against this ridiculous slur, I see no need to respond to Blumenthal’s pathetic labeling of me as “far-rightist.” Similarly, since Max Blumenthal’s work so obviously meets the Nation’s standards, I can only consider it a compliment that my work doesn’t.