Criticism v conspiracy
Yes, this is about antisemitism
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This Monday, paid subscribers got this month’s ET Read Home, a monthly book club of sorts. I wrote about Primo Levi’s The Truce.
With that! Onto news, Jews, and views.
NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about the sexual assault allegations against Graham Platner and the difference between criticism of AIPAC and antisemitic conspiracy.
A Norwegian soccer story for the road from ESPN: “Erling Haaland, Norway return home to heroes’ welcome after World Cup exit”
I loved this Bounces piece about all the pieces about how Czech women are so good at tennis and specifically at Wimbledon.
From the New York Times: “At Least 21 People Have Been Shot at by Federal Immigration Agents Since Last Year”
Relatedly, from the AP: “A federal immigration officer fatally shot a motorist in Maine on Monday, the second time in a week that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have used deadly force and at least the ninth time since President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown.”
From Forbes: “White House Defends 1882 Immigration Law Excluding Chinese Immigrants”
Also from the New York Times: “Mahmoud Khalil Accuses Trump Officials of Conspiring Against Him”
From CNN: “US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday vowed to ‘dismantle’ the International Criminal Court and urged other countries to join the effort as the Trump administration significantly escalates its campaign against the global institution. Rubio accused the ICC of ‘waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles,’ but with ‘the force of so-called international law.’”
From Vanity Fair: “You’re Not a Therapist. Stop Talking Like One”
MY VIEWS ON…
…criticism vs conspiracy!
This is a riff or expansion or whatever the word is on an idea from my Forward piece last week—linked above in the first bullet if you are so inclined—and that idea, illustrated above by one bird looking like it is whispering to another, is this: Criticism is about things that people (or institutions or whatever) have actually said and done. It is about holding them to account for how they have used their agency. Conspiracy is not a form or extension of criticism. Rather, it is about things that people have never said or done. It over-assigns agency to them, stripping it from others in the process.
I first came up against this when writing, reporting, and speaking about George Soros. One often hears, when one says that various unhinged accusations about him are antisemitic, a version of, “But it’s not antisemitic to criticize Soros!” And of course it’s not. It’s not antisemitic to say, for example, that it’s difficult to find a criminal justice reform NGO that hasn’t received money from his Open Society Foundations or that OSF was instrumental in getting immigrant welfare benefits reinstated and that this speaks to the role that billionaire philanthropists play in domestic politics. Those are things that he and OSF really did. It is, however, antisemitic to say that he was responsible for the Black Lives Matter protests or that he’s flooding the country with migrants. Those would be conspiracies in that they are giving agency to Soros for things he did not do while taking it from people like impassioned protesters or desperate migrants and asylum seekers.
In the piece above, I try to capture the same dynamic with respect to AIPAC. There are so many reasons to criticize AIPAC! There is so much that it says and does that I think is worthy of criticism! However, when you start saying or implying that AIPAC was behind a woman coming forth to allege sexual assault against a Senate candidate (despite the fact that other people said she had told them what happened to her years before the alleged assailant was a candidate, which, not sure how AIPAC would have pulled that one off), you are not criticizing AIPAC. You are pushing a conspiracy that assigns it too much agency and takes agency away from the woman who came forward.
Similarly, criticism of what Israel is actually doing, including pointed criticism, is not necessarily antisemitism. I sometimes get emails from people who think the criticism is wrong or naive or even unfair, and that’s fine, but none of that makes the piece of criticism inherently motivated by hatred of, or dangerous to, Jews as a people. Conspiracy is not simply criticism but louder. It is not, as an example, antisemitic or conspiratorial to note that Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian goalkeeper and killed an organizer of World Cup screenings during the tournament. It is, however, antisemitic to baselessly assert that the referee whom some are blaming for Egypt’s loss to Argentina was Jewish and that that “explains a lot of things,” or to change his Wikipedia entry to say so.
I will be the first to admit that this isn’t a science. There is criticism based in fact that is expressed in a way that relies on tropes, and there are things that sound like maybe they’re antisemitic conspiracies that are actually just descriptions of true events (the one that comes to mind: “Israel reportedly used NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware as a diplomatic bargaining chip”). Often, though, it’s not particularly difficult to tell when criticism is crossing a line, because what we’re talking about isn’t criticism at all.
I think what is striking to me about all of this is that it’s not like there’s a shortage of things to criticize about Israel, or powerful lobbying groups, or billionaire philanthropists. The choice to move from criticism to conspiracy is a choice to neglect all of those many things in favor of a worldview in which everything bad or hard to explain is the responsibility of too powerful and nefarious Jews. We do have a word for that.
…AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
This is a few weeks old but I didn’t share it when it came out so here it is: In Sources, Daniel Greene offers a vision for “Holocaust Education for Today”
From JTA: “Yet another survey has found that fewer than half of Jews in an American city identify as Zionists — this time in Milwaukee, the childhood home of Golda Meir, the Zionist icon and former Israeli prime minister.” I read a lot of reports on a lot of surveys and thought this one was very well done.
On his Substack, Shaul Magid shared his final sermon as rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue. It’s about “survivalism,” the way he sees the Jewish world (if there is such a thing) today, and what it would mean to live with the Judaism of the prophets.
I found this lovely, moving, and inspirational. From the Forward: “In the world of Jewish translators, she was known as a mentor, a friend and a literary giant”
From RNS and NPR: “As Israel divides Jewish communities, Yiddish draws a new generation.” I paused studying it after I had our son because classes were Tuesdays at his bedtime but maybe I should start up again.
-ET
"Whispering at Walton Hall" by Caza_No_7 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.