On antisemitism
Some thoughts on its role in society today
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Next Monday, paid subscribers will get February’s ET Leave Home, a monthly list of travel recommendations for different cities. Last month we went to Warsaw. Where in the world will we go next? You’ll find out (because I haven’t decided yet).
Paid subscribers to this newsletter also get The Political Cycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on politics in the US, UK, India, and the wider world, ad-free and directly to their inboxes from me (these posts will now unlock later).
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about Holocaust Remembrance Day and why it’s wrong, or at least limiting, to see any country or nation state as the heir to remembrance.
For Slate, I wrote about why everyone, and especially elected Democrats, should speak up and push back against Trump's antidemocratic and counterproductive antisemitism EO, and why they should do so not only for the good of those impacted, but for themselves.
I went on the “American Prestige” podcast to talk about the last days of Biden and the first days of Trump (I think that you can only listen to the first nine or so minutes unless you’re one of their paid subscribers, but I am linking to it anyway).
This week on our podcast, we talked about attacks on the “deep state” and who gets the blame for the economy.
I love Japanese Breakfast so of course I loved this profile.
For the last year and a half or so, I’ve worked with VSquare, a Central Eastern European investigative outlet. The people working there are some of the best journalists I’ve ever come across. Like many organizations all around the world, they’re impacted by the freeze on US funding, and so are fundraising. If you or anyone you know is interested in supporting journalism to protect liberal democracy and push back against oligarchy, corruption, and disinformation, you/they can donate here.
MY VIEWS ON…
…antisemitism!
Last week, in response to this article on antisemitism and its history and recent debates over what it is and is not, a reader and subscriber wrote, “There has been a lot of ink spilled, understandably, on how to define individual instances as antisemitic or not but less conversation on a wider theory of WHAT role antisemitism is playing in a broader abstract sense in society and culture…Personally I feel like something broader like that would be useful in helping parse whether any given…hand gesture is worth focusing on.”
For that reason, this little essay won’t get into definitions. The three that people often talk about — IHRA, Nexus, and JDA — are linked and you can read through and think about different attempts to define it (or not, if you don’t feel like it).
The commenter did suggest that it might be worth reading Shaul Magid’s Necessity of Exile, and I agree: you should! You can also read this interview I did with him about the book late in 2023.
The thing that he goes over that’s relevant to this question — the function of antisemitism in society — is that he makes very clear that, in order to actually, usefully unpack this question, we need to take into account power and the Jewish relationship to it. So antisemitic discrimination against Jews in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, in cases and places Jews did not have political power or, say, rights, is different from antisemitism in the North America today, where Jews can and do experience antisemitism on an interpersonal or casual or informal level, but are not discriminated against by law (though obviously this can change). An example that I often give to people is that the organizers of the rally against antisemitism and for Israel in 2023 made their first call to the Department of Homeland Security. It doesn’t mean that Jews in attendance or at the time weren’t experiencing antisemitism in their lives, but it’s fundamentally not the same as a case in which security authorities are authorized against Jews. Magid’s final example is the case in which Jews literally have power, ie in the state of Israel. If a Palestinian child throws a stone at an Israeli soldier, is that antisemitic? Magid’s argument, which is more sophisticated than how I’m presenting it here, is that no, it isn’t, and if we do understand that as antisemitic, we’re basically saying that any action by a group that has less power against institutions that have power over them is antisemitic.
With all of that said, two other things before I offer some links:
Someone once asked me if I’m blind to antisemitism on the left. I said that, first of all, if I were blind to it, of course I would say that no, I’m not, and second of all that of course there’s antisemitism on the left. No political party or ideology has a monopoly on it. It is unfortunate, in my view, that criticism or protest against Israel is often conflated with actual antisemitism on the left, which serves both to undermine calls against actual antisemitism and can push critics into more extreme positions. I also think we should be clear that something doesn’t need to be antisemitic in order to be violent or hurtful. Was splashing paint on Miriam, an Israeli restaurant in Park Slope, and accusing it of serving “genocide cuisine” antisemitic? I don’t know, particularly given that we saw similar acts and charges against Russian restaurants over the war in Ukraine. But I don’t need to know if it’s antisemitic to know that vandalizing an Israeli restaurant over Israel’s war is dangerous and wrong.
I will admit, however, that I worry more about antisemitism from the reactionary right because this is the antisemitism wielded by people with power all over the world today. Sometimes people will say, in response to this, that popular culture is a form of power. To this, I will borrow from Cersei in Game of Thrones: Power is power.
And the way that antisemitism is being used today to further reactionary control of power is this: Antisemitic conspiracies are used to make people more distrustful of their own societies. If you believe that shadowy Jewish hands are lurking behind everything, you don’t trust your own democracy, or the media, or your neighbors. Antisemitic conspiracy theories over assign agency to Jews and often also strip it from other minorities: the idea that George Soros is flooding the country with immigrants to remake American demographics is both antisemitic and also xenophobic and dehumanizing. As if there is no reason that people would come to seek asylum for no other reason than Soros’s plot. In society today, antisemitism is the straw that stirs the xenophobic, racist, conspiratorial drink.
And then, at the same time, the same people doing this decide to define antisemitism only as criticism of or protest against Israel, and then use their own support for Israel and the threat of antisemitism (so defined) to attack democratic and civil and even constitutional rights and divide Jews from other minorities. We should acknowledge that there are some Jews, including the prime minister of Israel, who think this is good. I obviously disagree.
Here are some things (besides Magid’s book) that have clarified my own thinking on this:
If you read nothing else in this newsletter, I hope you’ll read this interview with Jelena Subotić on Israel and the global far-right.
I’ve shared this here before, but this is a report on how different Jewish journalists and writers are understanding antisemitism and Jewish identities at this moment. I’m quoted in it but so are a lot of other people who see things differently than I do.
I thought this essay from last year on antisemitism and Jewishness in Germany is worth reading.
This essay by Mark Mazower on protests at Columbia was probably my favorite thing I read on the subject last year.
This is short, but Dov Waxman’s thread on why Trump’s EO is problematic is worth taking the time to read and think about.
I’ve shared this before, too, but I recommend this paper on what legally defining antisemitism in a certain way could mean for Jews.
Finally, the aforementioned commenter also directed me to this essay by Magid on why Jews have such a hard time discussing and debating antisemitism.
I hope this is helpful, or at least thought provoking.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
Also from Haaretz: “It appears that Israel's government and Germany's far right share an interest in portraying Palestinians as today's Nazis with global or Israeli leftists as their collaborators.”
From RNS: “A broad group of prominent national and local Jewish organizations has sent a letter to President Donald Trump voicing stern opposition to his immigration policies and urging him to abandon plans for what they describe as ‘widespread persecution of immigrants.’”
From JTA: “Benjamin Netanyahu says he will meet President Donald Trump at the White House next week, a date that would make the Israeli prime minister the first foreign leader to be invited to Trump’s residence since he retook office.”
-ET