ICYMI: Andrew Goldberg’s “Virus in Four Mutations”: Anti-Semitism Without Jewish Racism
David Shasha
Andrew Goldberg’s “Virus in Four Mutations”: Anti-Semitism Without Jewish Racism
As I frenziedly approached the start of the Shabu’ot holiday, I was preparing an article on yet another anti-Sephardic attack from Tablet magazine.
This time it was YU Neo-Con Ari Lamm creating a false binary between Sabato Morais and Judah Lyons regarding the national day of mourning for Abraham Lincoln in 1865:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/e28V8-nRNDE
Lamm reminds us that in the benighted Age of Trump and the Alt-Right there are Jews who are still willing to go out there and re-litigate historical issues involving our loyalty to America, and to put into question our attitude towards Slavery and the Union in the name of an absolutist Jewish exclusivism.
As I prepared my revisions to the article I began to think once again about White Jewish Supremacy and racism in the Jewish community.
It is important to keep in mind that when Jews speak of Anti-Semitism, they largely ignore the racism from within the Right Wing Orthodox and Zionist segments of their own community.
Those of us who live inside that Orthodox community understand all too well this Jewish racism and the way that it insidiously seeks to intimidate and silence those who speak out in favor of Liberal values, such as Pluralism and Tolerance.
It has become commonplace in our Synagogues to find many reactionary FOX News Trumpscum Jews bullying others who do not agree with them, effectively closing off Progressive voices inside the community.
The Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community is one of those places that has been utterly taken over by racism and reactionary values. From the time of the vile Isaac Shalom to the present moment of his most recent heir Jeff Sutton, a prominent Trump supporter, the community has reveled in its corrupt autocratic leadership; effectively erasing its own Sephardic heritage, and forcing its institutional and religious leaders into a feeble-minded acquiescence to Right Wing Trumpist values. It can especially be seen in a brainwashed youth, who pathetically repeat whatever the leadership tells them and have no independent minds of their own.
Being the last Sephardi in the community has brought with it the lethal opprobrium of this leadership; costing me my livelihood and my family, and finding myself cast adrift in a sea of unending pain and loneliness. It has been a rough ride that has been caused by Jewish racism and its close ties to what we now know to be Trumpworld values.
After performing my evening prayers for the holiday and eating dinner, I cut a piece of cake and was deciding what to watch on TV, when everything began to explode before my very eyes:
The brutal police murder of George Floyd once again set out in stark terms the difference and otherness that I have felt for so long, as we were seeing the anguish of the African-American community over the systemic racism that is meted out by those who do not respect human beings that do not share their skin color.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNX8-PWCi6E
As I was processing all this, I began to think of the many members of the Orthodox Jewish community who were likely oblivious to the continuing developments in the awful tragedy, and who were more worried about getting their Synagogues re-opened than about the intolerable death of yet another Black person in this country.
Indeed, living in the hermetic bubble of the FOX News world, such people would continue to worry about Anti-Semitism rather than the larger scourge of racism that they were a part of.
It is this callous obliviousness that has played such an important role in my own life as a Sephardi activist who continues to fight for the rights of the underprivileged, and to speak out against Jewish racism wherever it might be found.
As my TV was showing images of the protests that broke out all over the country that night, I decided to watch a documentary on Anti-Semitism by Andrew Goldberg currently being shown on PBS, that unwittingly speaks to these complex issues:
https://www.pbs.org/show/viral-antisemitism-four-mutations/
The documentary website begins to give us an indication of where Goldberg stands on the issue and how he deploys the “virus” metaphor:
Indeed, we see Right Wing Neo-Con figures like George Will, Fareed Zakaria, and Deborah Lipstadt, along with Centrists like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, among those who were interviewed for the film.
As I began to watch “Viral” that Right Wing Neo-Con element became much more pronounced. In fact, Goldberg chose as his primary interlocutors, members of The Tikvah Fund cabal.
I have of late been doing a lot of writing on the debilitating Tikvah phenomenon:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tcZ47eu45_GyLGHWIQYZiWtnTBZAgDXZVnixE0O3ZR0/edit
It is important to note that Professor Lipstadt, an expert on the Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, has routinely used that expertise at the service of HASBARAH:
https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2017/01/31/deborah-lipstadt-holocaust-hasabara/
She has been attacked by pro-Palestine activists for her shrill Zionist advocacy:
It is therefore no surprise that she is part of the Tikvah orbit:
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/annual-conference/2018-conference-speakers/
One of the primary advisors for “Viral” was Tablet magazine senior writer Yair Rosenberg, whose Tikvah pedigree is impeccable:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/yair-rosenberg
He was a Tikvah Fellow in 2011-2012:
https://www.facebook.com/tikvahfund/posts/10102513295108308
In a 2014 article for The Wall Street Journal he doled out the usual Tikvah propaganda on religion and culture:
His work at Tikvah Tablet has been focused on Anti-Semitism, and runs the usual confused gamut on the political spectrum.
The following article on New York Times “Fake News,” Alan Dershowitz, the Zionist Organization of America, and Steve Bannon provides an excellent indication of this ideological mess:
Rosenberg’s work for Tikvah Tablet reminds us of the problem presented by contemporary Jewish racism in the Trump era, as we see how Zionism links to the Alt-Right, and how Trumpscum Jews like Alan Dershowitz are trying to act as if they are not enablers of the New Fascism.
In point of fact, Trump has put Orthodox Jews like Jared Kushner, David Friedman, and Jason Greenblatt into positions of great authority, allowing them to dictate the country’s Israel policy, as it continues to move the conflict into new stages of dysfunction:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/trump-administration-trump-and-israel
But perhaps more important than these three Modern Orthodox Trumpists is the Alt-Right radical Stephen Miller, who has acted as an important trigger in many of the White House’s most egregiously racist policies:
I recently became aware of a case involving a whackjob named Louis Shenker that speaks to the current situation:
http://abuyehuda.com/2020/05/they-still-do-witch-hunts-in-massachusetts/
Shenker is yet another MAGA Alt-Right racist that has been embraced by the Orthodox Jewish community:
The situation becomes that much thornier and complex because of the role of ANTIFA in the process:
So, when we look at the racism of the Trumpjews, it becomes clear that Anti-Semitism must be re-examined in a much more critical light:
https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/18/new-film-explores-the-virus-of-global-antisemitism/
The Algemeiner article praising Andrew Goldberg should be read in this larger context.
Along with Deborah Lipstadt and Yair Rosenberg, Goldberg chose to highlight University of Chicago Professor David Nirenberg, who is also a member of the Tikvah Tablet world:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/david-nirenberg
Nirenberg is a particularly important figure for Sephardim, because of his vehement denunciation of Andalusian Convivencia, and the ways in which he has extended the work of Bernard Lewis and the racist Orientalists.
His Tikvah Neo-Con point of view can be seen in the following discussion of Islam and the West, which features an attack on Salma Khadra Jayyusi:
His Nation review of Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman’s book Sacred Trash closes with a brief, but sarcastic riposte on S.D. Goitein’s presentation of the Geniza world and the positive ties between Jews and Muslims in the Medieval period:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/cairo-cordoba-story-cairo-geniza/
His article “Sibling Rivalries, Scriptural Communities” provides a very clear picture of his darkly fatalistic thinking about interfaith relations and tolerance:
But his most direct attack on Convivencia can be seen in his demolition of Chris Lowney’s fairly benign book A Vanished World:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/232543
Very much in the dismissive Tikvah spirit, Nirenberg has proven himself to be an important antagonist of Andalusian Religious Humanism, as he continues to preach a new variation of Bernard Lewis’ “Clash of Civilizations” thesis.
In a review of his 2014 collection of essays, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today, John Tolan notes his disdainful attitude towards Maria Rosa Menocal’s view of Convivencia:
As Tolan states:
The final chapter, “Islam and the West: Two Dialectical Fantasies”, is a skilful unpacking of how European writers from Hegel forward have defined the role of Islam in European culture. For Hegel, Christian Europe is a synthesis of Hebrew faith and Hellenic reason: Islam, which represented both a regression to pure faith and a universalist expansion, had no positive role to play in the forging of European culture. Benedict XVI’s position in his infamous Regensburg address is quite similar to Hegel’s: for the pope Catholic Europe represented the most successful fusion of faith and reason, while implicitly Islam errs on the side of faith (just as Protestants and European freethinkers err on the side of reason). Over and against these “exclusionists”, “inclusionists” insist on the key role that Arab and Muslim culture played in forging Medieval European culture: trade, technology, science, philosophy, or poetry. Nirenberg looks closely at Maria Rosa Menocal’s analysis of the creation of European vernacular poetry from (at least in part) influences from courtly Arabic poetry from Andalus. Yet ironically, Menocal’s narrative strategy is similar to that of Benedict XVI: a fusion of different elements come together to make an ideal synthesis (courtly poetry, for Menocal; Catholic ecclesiology, for Benedict) only then to be challenged and broken. Both Benedict and Menocal longed for a lost medieval synthesis—for very different reasons.
Nirenberg is indeed very clever in the way he presents his Neo-Con viewpoint: rather than coming straight out and turning the matter into a Left-Right political issue, his comparisons and typologies seek to reflect a more “nuanced” understanding of the matter.
But the end result is the same: more anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment.
As Goldberg’s “Viral” examines Anti-Semitism, we see a good deal of this Neo-Con rhetoric, but very little historical background to put it into context.
The first thing we need to look at is the presentation of Ancient Israel as a nation in the Hebrew Bible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israelites
Where the Bible presents a coherent, family-based set of Israelite tribes, history records a very different disjointed story; a story that is critical to remember when we look at what Anti-Semitism is and how it manifested itself in the ancient world.
The Israelites that are presented in the Hebrew Bible seem to consistently resist the commands of their God:
Indeed, there is a constant tension in the Pentateuch when it comes to Israel’s “otherness” and its relations with the Gentiles.
There is the famous episode of Balak and Balaam:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a6nt7FftZJ6Yd_I2hsTWavo5L4UWpKtZmg1Bxq9bHyA/edit
We have the famous statement: “Hen ‘am le-badad yishkon, u-ba-goyim lo yithashab,” the Jews will live on their own and not be counted among the nations; a putatively prophetic communication that is immediately juxtaposed with the sexual-pagan orgiastic defilement at Ba’al Pe’or!
More than this dichotomy and its confusion is the famous case of the ‘Ir Nidahat, the Condemned City, which the Bible commands to be completely destroyed:
http://www.hatanakh.com/node/39018
The Hebrew Bible is not hesitant when it comes to legislating religious violence against pagans, and often presents God as a blood-thirsty warrior:
http://micahredding.com/blog/2012/05/02/cruel-god-hebrew-bible
It is important to keep this Biblical violence in mind when assessing the place of Anti-Semitism in our history.
The following article on Jewish Alienation cites the Orthodox thinker Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik:
https://www.jpost.com/not-just-news/on-being-alone-462031
Here is what Soloveitchik taught:
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik wrote of this point in his monumental work The Lonely Man of Faith. Soloveitchik writes: “The nature of the dilemma can be stated in a three-word sentence. I am lonely.” Soloveitchik explains that there is a difference between being lonely and being alone, and that while he is not alone, he is in fact lonely. It is the fate of a person of faith to remain alone. This is of course true on a national level as well. Israel is not alone, as much as we wish we were sometimes left alone; but we are lonely.
We thus need to keep the origins of Israelite society in mind as we move forward in time. The ancient Jews held to different understandings of what it meant to be a nation, as their Exile taught them new lessons about integration, lessons that played an important role in Ezra’s legislation after the return:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra%E2%80%93Nehemiah#Summary_and_structure
On the one hand, Ezra seeks to dissolve marriages between Jewish men and Gentile women, yet on the other there is an inexorable movement towards an acceptance that Israel is now living in a multi-national world, as it tries to situate itself as a participant in that order.
Where King Solomon took many foreign wives, the new Jewish legislation demanded endogamy. And where paganism was rife in Israel throughout the pre-Exilic period, Ezra now presented the people with a fully-formed Scripture that they were now obliged to follow.
It was a dramatic moment that brought the people to tears, as if they were hearing the words of Moses for the very first time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra%E2%80%93Nehemiah#The_%22law-book_of_Moses%22_read_by_Ezra
There are many other strange moments in the Biblical history, as we see in the case of Joshua and the Circumcision:
https://www.thetorah.com/article/joshua-circumcises-israel-in-response-to-egypts-scorn
And Solomon’s celebration of the Sukkot holiday at the dedication of the new Temple:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/sukkot-observances-through-the-second-temple-period/
This “forgetting” was repeated at the time of Ezra and his re-dedication of the Temple:
https://www.thetorah.com/article/sukkot-in-ezra-nehemiah-and-the-date-of-the-torah
The Hebrew Bible reminds us of the struggles of Israel to become one nation under God, and how much resistance there was to the singular nature of its Monotheism and its unsparing ethical system.
Of course, the price to be paid for this ethical system was alienation from the pagan world.
The ancient Greeks continued to see the Jews as eccentric in their worship of the one invisible God:
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-9780199840731-0140.xml
It was not until the Roman conquest that Judaism became a religio licita:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3886-caesar-caius-julius
It is interesting to note that during the Jewish War against Rome, the imperial government continued to leave Judaism alone outside Palestine’s military zone:
http://www.yorku.ca/pswarney/4102/Articles/trajano.pdf
Historians have discarded the idea of religious persecution in this regard:
If the objective of the authorities in first-century Rome really was systematically to stamp out Judaism as a religion, why then, one might ask, did they simultaneously protect the free exercise of Jewish religious practices in other parts of the empire? The many senatorial decrees issued at the end of the Republic, the measures concerning the Jews in Alexandria taken by Claudius, and the fact that, during the First Jewish Revolt, Titus was unwilling to abrogate privileges that had been accorded to the Jewish inhabitants of Antioch, are all expressions of a policy aimed at guaranteeing the unimpeded observance of Jewish cult practices.
Indeed, it was not until the advent of Roman Christian rule that Jews and Judaism found themselves under existential attack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism#Late_Roman_Empire
Christianity grew out of Jewish soil, and it decided that its messiah was the actual son of God, and that the Jews were perpetually responsible for his death:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_deicide
But with the advent of Islam, Judaism took on a very different character, as it sought to acculturate to the new system, and found itself in a “protected” position under the Dhimmi laws:
As Mark Wagner states:
In the seventh century, the nascent Arab-Islamic empire spread rapidly in a very short time. Muslims thus were forced to confront the question of how to deal with the non-Muslims in their midst from the very inception of Islam itself. Though the timing is not yet clear, a basic hierarchy between three groups emerged relatively early: at the top were (Muslim) believers, at the bottom of the hierarchy were unbelievers who should be fought, and there emerged an intermediate category of non-Muslims who had entered into an agreement with the Islamic state. Those in the third category were governed by a set of laws known as a pact, or dhimma in Arabic, and were called collectively ahl al-dhimma—literally “People of the Pact”—or just dhimmis. The term dhimmi is used interchangeably with the phrase “People of the Book,” suggesting that only Jews and Christians, as custodians of a monotheistic scripture, occupied this intermediate place between believers and infidels. However, as the Islamic empire expanded, the dhimmi category came to encompass Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists, sometimes with some rather convoluted and ingenious Muslim attestations to their monotheism.
The Islamic legislation was naturally nothing close to what we consider to be universal human rights, but in the ancient world it was far closer to toleration than what the Jews living under Christian rule experienced. And it was this toleration that led to the emergence of a cosmopolitan Sephardic culture in Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East.
We should remember that Islam took many restrictive concepts such as court procedure and witness testimony from the antecedent Jewish Law:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-non-jew-in-jewish-law/
Much discussion has taken place over Jewish legal ethics when it comes to financial dealings with Gentiles:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/daf-yomi-171-bava-kamma
These complications have become a part of Judaism in the Diaspora, as the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE led to the loss of Jewish sovereignty. And under the leadership of the Sages, as we see it presented in the Talmudic corpus, Judaism was forced to adapt to multi-cultural and multi-religious world.
With the advent of Zionism and a new Jewish national state, many of these questions were opened up anew; in spite of the fact that there was no real rethinking of Rabbinic Diasporism. And it is this atavistic Zionist blindness which has led to so many poor decisions and outcomes, as the state of Israel continues to blunder and bluff its way through Jewish national identity and its continuity with our history and religious culture.
“Viral” never seeks to explore this tangled historical web, which helps us to better understand that the “Original Hatred” is not so original after all, and that Jews themselves have always figured into the larger problem of religious violence and hatred.
Goldberg’s documentary provides the viewer with the voices of prominent Tikvah Neo-Con Jews speaking of Anti-Semitism, but neglects to present current nationalist racists like Yoram Hazony:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mIGjVlWpqgYgp24AabfaDqm-8jngdKbn7ZqN99Jpnpo/edit
It is important to make note of Hazony and his close ties to the White Christian Nationalists:
https://www.vox.com/2019/7/17/20696543/national-conservatism-conference-2019-trump
Note especially Hazony’s support for Fascists like Hungary’s Viktor Orban:
https://hungarytoday.hu/orban-meets-israeli-philosopher-yoram-hazony/
It is thus no surprise than Orban received a hero’s welcome from the Israeli PM when he visited there in 2018:
In fact, one of Netanyahu’s sons has affirmed the Zionist commitment to that White Christian Nationalism:
Goldberg completely ignores all this in his extensive segment on Orban’s Anti-Semitism:
https://www.pbs.org/video/hungarian-government-propaganda-campaign-fmzshd/
It is critical to see this omission as part of a larger Tikvah-led scheme to blunt the nature of Trumpist Alt-Right discourse as it has emerged in Israel and in the larger Jewish community.
It is important because of how directly and forthrightly Goldberg deals with the Left Wing Anti-Semitism and the Islamists.
Indeed, there is no question that after many years of socio-political and economic stagnation, the Arab-Muslim world has suffered from the scourge of religious extremism and its attendant violence. None of it should be minimized or wished away.
When we look at the complex configuration of Anti-Zionism and Anti-Western sentiment, which Goldberg shows in the segment on the now-deposed British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, we see the dog-ends of a lengthy process of Anti-Imperialism that has descended into extremist violence and political fanaticism and delusion.
It is not that dangers to Jews and Judaism do not exist, they are in fact quite real. The problem is made more difficult and complicated by the myriad ways in which contemporary Jews, in religious Orthodoxy and in political Zionism, have adopted many of the toxic values of Western Anti-Semites.
We have seen this on the Right with Trumpist figures like Dennis Prager:
And perhaps even more worryingly we have seen academics like Daniel Boyarin and Paula Fredriksen proclaim a moratorium on Pauline antinomianism and its deeply Anti-Jewish values:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zhy1aicotiXKJZBwn35uUMzNuQxkuEHiGiPKRBl_7M0/edit
What I have called the “New Talmudism” is a Leftist reflection of the toxic Evangelical values that have brought Christian Zionism and its “protection” of the Jews for messianic-eschatological purposes into clear focus:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPbxxP_kkV536tPTvMpsUE9feBgoBSa7QEP8iXXDHIk/edit
I see this combined movement as the full embodiment of White Jewish Supremacy, with its deep contempt for the classical Sephardic heritage and the spirit of Tolerance, Pluralism, and Convivencia.
Anti-Semitism is connected to a lack of tolerance and acculturation; a refusal to accept religious pluralism and cultural diversity.
I discussed the matter in my article Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ landmark 2002 book The Dignity of Difference:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXWjQ5cVFMYVNQWVU/view?ths=true
It is significant to note the outpouring of hostility from the Orthodox-Zionist Jewish world towards the book when it was first published:
Indeed, in what would be a portending of his future actions, Sacks revised the controversial portions of the book, as he would eventually find his way back into the bosom of the current Jewish racism that continues to infect the Orthodox Jewish community:
https://blogs.yu.edu/news/torah-and-western-thought-across-the-pond/
Sacks’ ongoing participation in programs with Trumpjews like Rabbi Meir Soloveichik reminds us of the complex internal politics of the Jewish community at present.
“Viral” presents certain aspects of Anti-Semitism at the current moment, but neglects the very long and complicated history of this racism against us, and the many variations in Ashkenazi and Sephardi culture when it comes to dealing with it.
Jewish History is an evolving thing, which must force us to see the many sides of an issue. And that includes Anti-Semitism and racism.
We mentioned earlier the vexing case of Louis Shenker, which brings together the shrill Neo-Con cries of Anti-Semitism while ignoring the deeply offensive Trumpist Alt-Right racism that has also become part of the current Jewish landscape:
The group supporting Shenker, Americans for Peace and Tolerance, presents some Orwellian issues:
http://www.islamophobia.org/islamophobic-organizations/170-americans-for-peace-and-tolerance.html
And CAIR is called racist by the Zionists:
Americans for Peace and Tolerance is another organization founded by Charles Jacobs, a name Sephardim became familiar with when his previous initiative The David Project produced the tendentious HASBARAH documentary on Arab Jews called “The Forgotten Refugees”:
https://www.jimena.org/resources/forgotten-refugees/
Which once again brings us back to White Jewish Supremacy and Sephardi ignorance:
And while “Viral” does have a segment on the Trumpdeath Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, Goldberg did not interview Bari Weiss, a figure who connects The David Project to The Tikvah Fund and to the New Anti-Semitism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/hGbojJTkhB4/K4kSTje6BQAJ
Goldberg does however present the French North African Jews and the lethal problems they face from the Islamists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNNA96QTA7s
What he does not show is how French North African Jewish identity has changed over time, with Ashkenazi Zionist alienation taking over their traditional Arabic culture:
http://lubavitch.com/news/article/2115345/The-First-Outpost-Casablanca-Morocco.html
This comes in stark contrast to Joann Sfar’s brilliant presentation of North African Jews in his classic graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pH_hEwUcvmOEy5tdJ5brNibZYwn60hWvypYGTZFZC_o/edit
It is indeed a very long way from Sfar’s North African Jewish Humanism rooted in Maimonidean values, to the eschatological messianism of the Schneersohn-Christ cult and its deeply-held magical tenets.
Again, I am not denying in any way the existence of Anti-Semitism and its dangers to the Jewish people. Nor am I trying to use Jewish racism to exonerate that vicious Anti-Semitism.
What I am asking is for people on all sides of the cultural-religious political divide to better understand how we got to this point, and what strategies we might use to extricate ourselves from the murderous web of hate.
So, while “Viral” works diligently to present Anti-Semitism as an immutable disease to the human organism, it resolutely refuses to take an inward look at what it means to be Jewish today, and how it is necessary for all of us to examine our own racism in the context of a very dangerous global movement towards nationalist extremism, which in itself is wrapped in violence and intolerance of the Other.
David Shasha
From SHU 961, August 26, 2020