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The new anti-Semitism
Series of books look at the reinvention of an ancient scourge
By Gil Troy
News & Observer
July 11, 2004
There is a new anti-Semitism festering in America -- more subtle, genteel, elusive and seemingly more defensible than the pre-Auschwitz variety. It will not bar Jews from country clubs or Ivy League schools, nor will it directly insult your Jewish friend, neighbor, co-worker or son-in-law. Although there have been some campus riots and some ugly anti-Jewish slurs, overall it lacks the violence of today's Islamic anti-Semitism whose handiwork one sees in the burning embers of a Turkish synagogue, the carnage of an Israeli seder, the scars left on a beaten French Jew.
After the Holocaust, experts deemed anti-Semitism the social disease of the right, rooted in lower class thuggery. Sixty years later, many critics detect this new anti-Semitism among professed liberals, metastasizing in the university seminar room and the writer's salon, masquerading as "merely" anti-Zionism and coexisting with the cruder anti-Semitism of the Arab and occasionally European street.
This new anti-Semitism is heard in talk of "the Jews," rather than Jews. It has been felt in university campaigns to disinvest from Israel -- but no other country -- and in charges that "the Jews" triggered the war in Iraq -- when some Jewish Democrats opposed the war as passionately as some Jewish neoconservatives endorsed it. It has been felt in broad condemnations of terrorism that somehow overlook Israeli victims or Jewish victims.
Admittedly, this new anti-Semitism begins with Israel, and the searing, decadeslong, Arab-Israeli conflict. But unlike most criticism of Israel -- or of the United States, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, or the Palestinian Authority -- it goes from the incidental to the essential, from condemning specific acts to repudiating the country and its supporters. Often using the rhetoric of anti-colonialism, and, ironically, anti-racism, to conceal their anti-Judaism, many of these critics reveal their bias through their one-sided actions and venom. The tics of the new anti-Semites include: their obsessive and disproportionate focus on Israel; their zeal to demonize with the most painful of symbols by "Nazifying" the Jewish state; their double-standards, not just holding up Israel to uniquely high standards, but also judging Jewish nationalism as if the world were not divided into at least 180 other tribes; and their insensitivity to Jewish suffering.
Given the centurieslong scourge of anti-Semitism, talk of "the Jews" comes laden with historical baggage. Given the current cultural climate -- where the onus is on critics of traditionally oppressed groups such as blacks and women to prove they are not racist or sexist -- vehement detractors of Israel must demonstrate that their denunciations are justified and not malevolent.
The new anti-Semitism has inspired a high wave of new books that reflect varying attitudes and approaches toward this ancient malignancy. Authors writing about the new anti-Semitism roughly divide into three camps: converts, fundamentalists and skeptics. Many of the Jewish essayists in journalist Ron Rosenbaum's comprehensive collection, "Those Who Forget the Past" (Random House, $16.95, 721 pages) echo the feminist Phyllis Chesler's sobering and angry "The New Anti-Semitism" (Jossey-Bass, $24.95, 318 pages) in reporting how betrayed they feel when encountering "the longest hatred." Harvard's President Lawrence Summers at Memorial Church, Jonathan Rosen in the New York Times Magazine, David Brooks in the conservative Weekly Standard, repeat the same mantra: I grew up without anti-Semitism; I thought it was eradicated; I am reluctantly, surprisingly, angrily, denouncing it, even when it masquerades as "only" criticizing Israel. These converts demonstrate that if once a conservative was a liberal who has been mugged by reality, many modern conservatives are liberals who have been bombed.
Deeper, more enduring, sometimes too far-reaching explanations come from the fundamentalists. These prophets have long warned about anti-Semitism -- and are dismayed that they were right. These vindicated Chicken Littles who warned that the sky was falling place this longstanding social disease into global and historical context. In "Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism" (Harper SanFrancisco, $24.95, 256 pages), Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League demonstrates how Muslim jihadists, neo-Nazi skinheads and radical black intellectuals all rally irrationally against "the Jew."
In their 20th anniversary update to their 1983 text, "Why the Jews: The Reason for Antisemitism" (Touchstone, $14, paper, 268 pages), Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin identify Judaism as "the root cause of anti-Semitism." Their theory pushes the depressing debate about hatred into a wonderful, rollicking argument about the rich Jewish narrative, the story of an extraordinary combination of both a religion and a nation, a people with a theology. Even if not convincing, the argument is intellectually more inviting than Foxman's conversation-stopping conclusion that just as "the origins of good and evil ... are mysterious," so "it is with anti-Semitism."
A third group of contributors find no such mystery -- and no great anti-Semitic evil in the modern world. These skeptics could also be called anti-anti-Semitism anti-Zionists. Overwhelmingly from the left, the skeptics dismiss complaints about modern anti-Semitism as a modern blood libel directed by "apologists for Israel." In one essay in "The Politics of Anti-Semitism" (Counterpunch, $12.95, 186 pages), a collection edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Michael Neumann acknowledges the "genuine anti-Semitism in the Arab world" and deems it "utterly inexcusable." Then he adds: "So was your failure to answer Aunt Bee's last letter." To Professor Neumann -- and his comrades -- "the scandal today is not anti-Semitism but the importance it is given."
Many of the skeptics would never write about women or blacks or homosexuals the way they write about Jews. Would progressives ever "trivialize" racism, mock sexism, compare homophobia to being rude to "Aunt Bee"? The first sentence in the editors' introduction to "The Politics of Anti-Semitism" reflects the problem. Claiming "There's no more explosive topic in American public life today than the issue of Israel ... and its influence on American politics" raises suspicions in a world of terrorism, economic transition, environmental depredation, and continuing racism and poverty. In fact, it reeks of the anti-Semite's historic tendency to place the Jew at the center of all social evils.
Reading these books, seeing how many who condemn the new anti-Semitism have no difficulty criticizing specific Israeli policies, proves that it is possible to distinguish anti-Semitism from honest criticism of Israel. Too many of Israel's critics make the distinction clear by plunging into crude Jew hatred, rationalizing it, or soft-pedaling it. The vitriol and the masquerades must end. As with any disease, proper diagnosis is the first step toward finding a cure. The next step is to mobilize people of conscience throughout the world to eradicate both the milder and more virulent strains, for all our sakes.
Gil Troy teaches history at McGill University in Montreal.
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