antisemitism quick sending before shabbos
Leon Kraiem
Earlier this week, my friend Ross sent me this Substack post by Matt Yglesias: “The anti-antisemitism movement is failing.” The argument sketched out in the article, as I understood it, is something like: “When antisemitism was fringe, going after it like an inquisitor made sense. But now that it’s a part of American life, ‘calling it out’ won’t work, and false accusations and gratuitous uncharity will make the problem worse. Jewish institutions are failing to meet the historical moment, because they’re taking liberties that once made sense, but are no longer wise or even possible for them to take.” I liked the article. But I think it went too far, and at the same time didn’t go far enough.
I think the idea that if you criticize Israeli policy, the ADL will label you an antisemite is a myth. Are there boomers and hasbara-types on Twitter who will label as Jew-hate mere politics about the Middle East? Of course. But mainline Jewish institutions consistently draw a line between thoes two things. The reason they accused the Tentifada kids, say, of antisemitism is that they openly fell on the antisemitic side of it. It’s easy to hate Bibi without approving of October 7 – most Israelis do; but you can’t explicitly endorse October 7 and then pretend you just hate Bibi when someone calls you out on it. So I don’t agree with that bit of the article.
At the same time, few of the leaders of those protests would proudly call themselves Jew-haters – to the contrary, they’d be offended at the suggestion. I think their attitude toward Israelis is straightforwardly bigoted (they wouldn’t justify terrorist attacks on any other population), and I put two-and-two together by noting that Israel is both ‘the nation of the Jews’ and ‘the Jew among the nations’ – but they don’t see it that way. And like I said, those people are the edge-cases. As Matt noted, the vast majority of those caught up in antisemitism allegations as a result of their Israel politics have no conscious hatred toward Jews; and this can be true even when accusations of antisemitism are, as in the case of Oct. 7-justifiers, surely reasonable.
Matt chooses a good example with those Ana Kasparian tweets. I’ve been watching The Young Turks with some regularity since I was thirteen. When Ana says she has no problem with Jewish people, there is dispositive evidence that she believes what she says. And, in a sense, it’s also objectively true: If she meets an American Jew who renounces the State of Israel and all its inhabitants, she has no problem with him. And, as much as her rhetoric about Israelis spills explicitly into comments about their Jewishness, she probably feels the same way (at least consciously) about a Druze commander in the IDF as she does about any Jewish one.
But of course, “The goyim know” is classic white-supremacist talk. Even the farthest off the deep end Jewish antizionists – Finkelstein, Beinart, Chomsky – would never use that sort of language. The most charitable interpretation of Ana’s usage of it is that she’s honestly confused, and thinks it’s only meant to deride Ben Gvir-type Jewish supremacists; but this is essentially to say, “Ana isn’t hateful, she just has no critical thinking skills,” which is not a good defense for a global affairs pundit. And, of course, her tweet doubling-down on her Stormfront code-switching reads nothing like Martin Luther King and everything like latter-years Martin Luther. All Ana’s done is subbed in “Israelis” for “the Jews,” and then proceed to use classic antisemitic tropes to talk about half the world’s Jewish population, and almost nobody else.
What is to be done about this, then? I think the answer, in practical terms, is not to “call out” Ana on her potential antisemitism – although, among ourselves, there is certainly a value to calling a spade a spade – and confront her instead on how the hatred she’s caught seems to have disabled her critical faculties, that her model of the world is demonstrably mistaken, and anyone who goes to her for analysis will be fundamentally confused about what’s happening in the Middle East. Antisemitism is always, in this way, a symptom of someone not doing their job – when Candace Owens spins some antisemitic conspiracy theory, one can “call her out” on the very obvious origins of her mind-virus, or one can simply point out that the claims she’s making aren’t true.
When those students at Columbia took over Hamilton Hall, I found their “intifada” banner pretty upsetting, as well as their chants of “from the water to the water, Palestine is Arab.” But I was more offended that cops were present all over the perimeter of the campus, while a felony – breaking and entering – was being committed right before their eyes, and the school wouldn’t let them go in to stop it. The problem with the encampments wasn’t that their speech was hateful, it’s that once their actions were treated like speech. Universities have a forum for airing out opinions about the Middle East: the classroom. Of course, academia is antisemitic as well; but only because it’s bad at academics. If a Middle East Studies degree leaves you thinking Israelis are colonists, that means you’ve done a bad job of studying the Middle East.
Now, the formula above might sound tautological – “if it’s antisemitic that means it’s not true, if it were true it wouldn’t be antisemitic” – but if we’re being intellectually honest, that’s a feature, not a bug. An antisemite might be inclined to think Israel’s committed a genocide in Gaza even if it hasn’t; but if it has, and a non-hateful person would come to the same conclusion, then we must be free to talk about it. Moreover, this isn’t just a wise decision-making process for when to call someone an antisemite. It may be the closest we can get to a shared definition of “antisemitism.” When a person who is otherwise intelligent says obviously stupid things, but only when they talk about Israel, or a person who “trusts the science” thinks Jews caused Covid-19, we can choose to define “antisemitism” as just that explanatory gap.
To be clear, I do think antisemitism exists, as an actual, ontic thing. But what it is? Really, that’s anyone’s guess. For religious Jews, it’s the forces of evil rebelling against a people tasked them with rooting them out for good. For religious Christians and Muslims throughout the ages, it was divine justice, for having met the prophets face-to-face and rejected them. Christopher Hitchens – who would only identify as Jewish in the face of an antisemite – thought it was something to be proud of, for just that same reason – a rebellion by the childishly fundamentalist toward a nation of proto-atheists who were willing to call out their BS.
And of course, in a secular context – for those who want to treat is as nothing but an idea, with no supernatural mystery about it – so-called “antisemitism” is famously adept at changing shapes. It’s religious, then it’s racial. Anti-communist, but also anti-capitalist. “When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall said, ‘Jews go home to Palestine.’ Fifty years later, when the walls all screamed, ‘Jews get out of Palestine.’” The metaphor du jour – helped, I’m sure, by the collective experience of Covid – is that antisemitism is a virus, which mutates each time it infects its host. And I think this metaphor is instructive not only about how to treat it – quarantine when you can, but not to the point of coercive overreach – but also how to prevent it: epistemic hygiene, sunlight as the best disinfectant, the political immune system that is functioning liberal democracy.
There is more to be said about this, including with regard to Matt’s comparison of antisemitism-panic with the sins of the Great Awokening. But Shabbat comes in momentarily, so I think I’ll call this a post, and quicky post it.