Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
A Star of David hangs from a fence outside the dormant Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood on Wednesday, marking four years since 11 people were killed in America’s deadliest antisemitic attack on October 27, 2018.
Antisemitism is all the rage these days (in every sense of the word). The vast majority of its current discussion is devoted to, as The New York Times calls him, “Kanye West, the rapper and fashion designer who now goes by Ye.” Mr. Ye is quite possibly the world’s most famous antisemite at the moment. When I plugged in his (original) name with “anti semitism,” Google returned well over a hundred million hits. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons. He is, after all, an influential fellow and he is making some terrible statements and feelings kosher, so to speak, for some of his admirers.
But let’s face it: He’s also nuts. His Jew hatred is part of his nuttiness. (Alas, paired with “mental illness,” he only gets about four million hits.) Jews, and those who love us (or care about hatred in general) have far bigger problems than Mr. Ye. One of them is Donald Trump. Another is the entire “MAGA” movement that currently rules the Republican Party that is quite possibly going to take over the world’s most powerful government. A third, though it is impossible to separate from the first two (which are, of course, impossible to separate from each other), is Tucker Carlson (who has been supporting Ye) and the alleged “news” network that broadcasts dog-whistle Jew hatred nightly to cable’s largest audience.
One problem with gauging the amount of antisemitism in any society at any time is our inability to define it properly. The most common definition employed is this one, which is employed by, among others, the U.S. government and is implicitly designed to include criticism of Israel. Two hundred or so scholars of Judaism did not like it for that reason and so came up with this one as an alternative, but it has yet to gain much traction among most Jewish organizations or the mainstream media.
Most media reports rely on figures supplied by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to determine the scope of antisemitism in any given time and place. The problems with this are also extensive. Some of them are specific. The ADL classifies what it considers to be overly harsh criticism of Israel, opposition to its existence as a Jewish state, as well as support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement as ipso facto antisemitic. It includes such statements (and other such manifestations, such as campus demonstrations) in its statistics.
But they are no such thing. You may disagree with them—I usually do—but it’s nonsense to lasso them in with hatred against all Jews. “Israel” does not equal “Jews.” (That’s one reason why my new book, We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, to be published on November 22, has the title it does.) The ADL’s definition of antisemitism defines virtually every Palestinian in the world into an antisemite, together with most global human rights organizations, the members of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even “proud Jewish” ice cream impresarios who say they “love Israel” but don’t want to support the occupation. It also defines not only the (left-wing) members of Jewish Voice for Peace as antisemites, but also the huge ultra-Orthodox, intensely anti-Zionist Satmar sect of Hasidim—whose anti-Zionism is rooted in Masechet Ketubot (111a) in the Talmud (“They shall be taken to Babylonia and there they shall remain until the day that I recall them, said the Lord.”).
Somebody who tweets under the name, believe or not, “Groovy” put the issue nicely in response to some antisemitic jerk: “Israel, the country, is oppressing Palestine. Not Judaism, which is a religion that consists of people who have been disenfranchised and oppressed for all of history just for existing. It’s really not that difficult to comprehend and even less difficult to not be anti-Semitic.”
The best definition/discussion of antisemitism I’ve seen is available from my friends at T’ruah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. You can find that here. Spoiler alert from this T’ruah tweet:
The ADL, AIPAC, and the American Jewish Committee, among many, many other Jewish organizations, would have you believe otherwise. They do so (yet again) for multiple reasons. The first is that they are in the business of raising money to expand the size and influence of their organizations, and panic over the issue is good for business. And before you accuse me of antisemitism (or in my case, self-hatred) for saying so, I’ll add that this is true of almost all organizations. (During the 25 years I spent at The Nation, I often had reason to repeat the slogan “Bad for the country, good for The Nation.”) I taught adult education classes for seniors at both the Jewish Association for Services to the Aged (JASA) and the 92nd Street YM-YWHA (Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association, now just called 92NY), and I promise you, there is no fear greater among Jewish seniors than that of a “second Holocaust.” These are what one Jewish professional quoted in my book call the “guilt and gelt generation,” and they are the backbone of these groups’ membership.
As to their funders, many are right-wing Republicans. That’s why AIPAC is funding so many MAGA election deniers this cycle and seeking to defeat so many progressive Democrats in local primaries. As a result, these groups are far less exercised about the consistently voiced antisemitism of the (now ex-) president of the United States, the national Republican Party, the most famous Republican congresswoman, or the candidate for governor of Pennsylvania or Arizona than they are about either Ilhan Omar—who is not an antisemite, as antisemites do not make statements like this one—or some dumbass college student somewhere, who may or may not have said something genuinely antisemitic, but hardly deserves mention in a “both sides” comparison with those above.
Another reason for the intense focus on criticism of Israel rather than that of Jews generally is that since 1967, most Jewish organizations have enthusiastically participated in what the Jewish scholar and rabbi Shaul Magid has termed the “Zionization of American Jewry” as “the ticket into the club of Jewish peoplehood.” The intense focus on support for all of Israel’s actions—often combined with the sacralization of the Holocaust—has had the effect of hollowing out the presentation of the actual content of secular American Judaism to young people who, in recent years, have been leaving organized Judaism in droves. Playing up the threat to Israel and equating its criticism with antisemitism has become just about the only way that these organizations know how to reach American Jews. Malcolm Hoenlein, longtime executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, explained in February 2022 that while many people liken the contemporary threat of antisemitism to “1933, 1938”— that is, Hitler’s Holocaust—“it’s not 1938 because of the State of Israel. I think that is the big difference.” But Hoenlein saw a silver lining in the fact that “antisemitism is going to awaken a lot of young people to a sense of community because they feel vulnerable, they feel alone.”
Ironically, some Israelis, most especially Bibi Netanyahu, participate in this same sort of rhetoric. American antisemitism is also good for Israel. It plays up the idea, long a mainstay of Zionist ideology, that Jews are not safe anywhere but Israel and that the creation of the state has rendered diaspora Judaism unnecessary and slightly ridiculous. As the great Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell once observed, Zionist ideology, with its doctrine of shlilat ha’golah—the negation of the diaspora—“at times resembled [that] of the most rabid anti-Semites.”
Netanyahu, Trump’s fellow aspiring autocrat, not only prefers Trump to Democrats, but agrees with the notion that (the often antisemitic) right-wing Christian Zionists, not the (mostly liberal) American Jewish community, constitute Israel’s “best friends” in this country, and so is cool with the forms of antisemitism that reinforce this idea. What’s more, it turns attention away from the fact that Israel, which was founded as a refuge for endangered Jews around the world, has, through its treatment of the Palestinians and the feelings this inspires, itself made the world a far more dangerous place for Jews.
Take a look at The Forward’s recent deep dive into alleged incidents of antisemitism at George Washington University. If you take Israel out of the equation, there’s not much there at all. And yet countless Jewish organizations are treating the phenomenon as a crisis, raising money from frightened parents and grandparents and seeking to bully universities into banning all activism on behalf of the Palestinians. This is happening at CUNY, and especially at Brooklyn College, where I teach, as you can see here. (Believe me, Jewish life at CUNY—again absent criticism of Israel—is the least of the problems experienced by my criminally underfunded and underappreciated gem of American public education.)
I’ve got a lot more to say about all of the above, which is one of many reasons you should order my most excellent book, but here are two more quick points that require clicking:
- On the anniversary of the “Tree of Life” massacre, let us take note of the fact that, “both sides” BS notwithstanding, “the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.”
- If you want to see an almost beautifully pristine example of the successful “working of the refs,” take a look at the way the ADL bends its institutional knee to the dishonest promoters of antisemitism at Fox News.
Music next week, I promise. In the meantime, here are 32 seconds of thematically appropriate live performance.
