Anti-Semitism

This a series of posts explores anti-Semitism, its origins, the motivations behind it, its various manifestations, its consequences, and its possible future. The series also proposes a method for determining when an act or statement is anti-Semitic and concludes with some suggestions for remedying the consequences of anti-Semitism. A series of discussion questions is also included.

Review of the previous post.

The previous post, post number 22 of 33, was the second post of two posts discussing possible remedies for the consequences of anti-Semitism and focused on the role of repentance to human progress.

Preview of this post.

This post, post number 23 of 33, discusses the new anti-Semitism.

1. New Anti-Semitism

            An article in the October 2015 issue of Mosaic Magazine by Ben Cohen discusses a new form of Anti-Semitism. The title of the article is “How Anti-Semitism Became a European Social Movement” and it is worthwhile to discuss this article at some length.

The article begins with a statement regarding traditional anti-Semitism:

Anti-Semitism was born in modern societies because the Jew did not assimilate himself,” wrote the French-Jewish thinker Bernard Lazare in 1894, a few months after the arrest of Captain Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason. “But,” Lazare continued, the “fundamental and everlasting contradiction” of anti-Semitism is identified as: “when anti-Semitism ascertained that the Jew was not assimilated,” it reacted in two conflicting directions, simultaneously “reproach[ing] him for it and . . . [taking] all necessary measures to prevent his assimilation in the future.”

Anti-Semitism has become a social movement. As defined in the article, a “social movement”:

 is a creature of the post-1968, New Left-dominated theoretical landscape. Very simply: although social movements may assume organizational form—think of Greenpeace, a product of concerns about the environment, or PETA, a product of concerns about the treatment of animals—their aim is less to create enduring political vehicles than to change popular sensibilities in the name of a greater social good. Thus, to identify oneself with a social movement is to adapt one’s beliefs and behavior in accordance with its vision. A core belief—that, say, we are ruining the environment for which we are all responsible—will then lead an individual to adopt certain behaviors, like shunning some foods in favor of others, or recycling renewable materials, or owning a Prius. Once the sum of these individual behaviors reaches a critical mass, attitudes that originally may have seemed counterintuitive or peculiar become established as wholly positive moral and social norms. In some cases, such norms may become a litmus test of candidacy for office, or be enshrined in court decisions or embodied in regulation.

The author goes on:

What is the core belief of anti-Semitism as a social movement? In my view, it has two integrally related parts: opposition to Jewish national power abroad (i.e., Israel) and suspicion of Jewish loyalties at home (the sin of “communitarisme,” or “communalism,” cited by Wistrich in the French context, and essentially a fancier term for “clannishness”).  Out of this core belief, and the social movement that has gathered around it, there has emerged a standardized vocabulary and set of rhetorical tools.

            Most familiar is the move to elevate the Palestinian cause—in reality, a local struggle between two peoples, not dissimilar from other national conflicts in the world today—into what might be called the ideology of “Palestinianism.” From this vantage point, the Palestinian Arabs have assumed the status of iconic, transcendental victims, rather as the Jews did for a brief period after World War II, and as Israel did until 1967. Moreover, the substitution of the one group for the other is hardly accidental. Those who kneel fervently before the altar of Palestinian victimhood can be relied on to traffic in the correlative themes of Israeli racism and brutality, casting the state of the Jews as a carbon copy of South Africa’s old apartheid regime, or as a legatee of the Nazis, or even (in the perverse Twitter hashtag #JSIL) as a Jewish version of the Islamic State gang raping, murdering, enslaving, and decapitating thousands of innocents in its rampage across Syria and northern Iraq.

The members of this social movement even go out of their way to distance themselves from “anti-Semitism” by re-defining it as a “device invented and exploited by the Jews themselves in order to censor frank discussion of the Zionist and Jewish present by invoking the sufferings of the Jewish past.”

The article goes on to discuss the ramifications of the change from traditional anti-Semitism into a social movement:

Because anti-Semitism as a social movement is so loose and “horizontal,” so politically promiscuous, so much more a matter of attitude than of argument, of fashion than of ideology, it is arguably even less susceptible of being contained than a party or a government subject to defeat or recall. In addition, insofar as it can persuade people to see themselves as reacting to illegitimate manifestations of Jewish “power,” the movement can channel the much greater countervailing power of any number of disparate and pre-existing popular discontents with contemporary European life that have nothing to do with the Jews.

Which is more frightening: theology or social movement? Both move in the same direction: Jew hatred.

Preview of the next post.

The next post, number 24 of 33, is the first post of a series of ten posts discussing how to determine if an act or statement is anti-Semitic.