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Attacks on Jews, and a Leftist’s Attempt to Speak a Bit of Inconvenient Truth

 

I read Bari Weiss’s new book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism out of curiosity. I wondered if she would really speak truth to power and slap the hand that pays her salary, the New York Times. She did not. She is a woman of the left and a talented columnist, both of which come across in this small, easily read volume. I do not envy her the task she set for herself. I do not know if anyone could write an approachable appeal, that would both address the prominent sources of anti-Semitism and keep the ear of even one major faction on either side of the great political divide.

This is a lengthy and critical review, arranged with the following section headers: “A few administrative details,” “Book outline,” “Too far right?” “Not far enough left?” “Naming radical Islam,” “Review of reviews,” and finally some closing thoughts under “Civility?” Fair warning: this ended up being a very critical review. For balance, you should go read Cathy Young’s review, and Melissa Langsam Braunstein at the Federalist, both of which I link and excerpt in the “Review of reviews” section.

A few administrative details:

How to Fight Anti-Semitism was published 10 September 2019. At 206 pages plus four thank-you pages, it fits nicely in a cargo pocket or pocketbook. There are no footnotes, no endnotes, no index, and no references. The prose is very approachable, making it a fairly quick read.

I borrowed the book from my local library, first in line for one of two copies being processed for library use. There were no other patrons jumping on the waitlist. I got it on a Thursday afternoon, read it cover to cover with one cup of iced coffee, closing the book with my notes about three hours later.

It has been three weeks since reading and first drafting some rough thoughts, as I mulled things over. A check of the Mesa library kept showing no one else requesting the book. Checking the Maricopa County Library District, there was only slight interest. Usually, when a new book shows up in the cue to be processed for library loan, there is a bit of a waiting list. Not so with this book. Indeed, even in the Phoenix library system, the vibrant Jewish community in Phoenix has not generated a strong demand for Bari Weiss’s warnings and recommendations.

Book outline:

Bari Weiss begins with a personal account of hearing about the deadly attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, October 27, 2018. She grew up in that community and was bat mitzvahed in the Tree of Life congregation. This raised in her mind the question of whether and how America had become dangerous for Jews. While a woman of the left, she is determined to clearly identify the full spectrum of threat sources, not just those approved by Democratic Party partisans. Weiss describes “a three-headed dragon” of anti-Semitism: far right, far left, and radical Islam. She seems to invite all people of goodwill in America to consider her warnings, yet from the very outset there are hints her notion of people of goodwill excludes a great many Americans:

This book is for anyone, Jew or gentile, who is concerned not with what is fashionable but with what is true. This book is for anyone, Jew or gentile, who loves freedom and seeks to protect it. It is for anyone, Jew or gentile, who cannot look away from what is brewing in this country and the world and wants to do something to stop it. (p.25-6)

Weiss seeks to build a brief historical case for each of these threat sources and then address the current environment and possible near future. She starts with the right wing, then, having tried to bank some credit with the left, turns to criticize the left, followed finally by the especially sensitive (to the left) Islamic source of modern anti-Semitism or Jew-hatred. Having made the case for concern about a rise in violent anti-Semitism, Bari Weiss ends with a series of recommended actions for Jews to take.

Yes, the recommendations are for her fellow Jews, not a mix of recommendations that include that wider audience she seemed to invite at the beginning. This disconnect was noted in a relatively favorable review we will come to in a bit. Ultimately, then, Bari Weiss has crafted a readable threat-assessment and self-help book. I cannot speak to the efficacy of the self-help portion, and invite Ricochet members with a better vantage point to address this. Choosing such a self-limiting approach might help explain the lack of interest, at least in the Arizona reading public.

Too far right?

Bari Weiss seeks to keep Jews on the liberal left, painting an inflated picture of the far right. She includes the Ku Klux Klan when Jonah Goldberg laid out in Liberal Fascism the plain truths that the KKK was reborn in the early 20th Century as fanboys of The Birth of a Nation. [Liberal Fascism, p.259] As any informed journalist should know, this movie was given a rocket fuel boost by the first Progressive Democrat in the White House, President Woodrow Wilson, a stone-cold white supremacist. Wilson shows up nowhere in this brief account, certainly not on the left side of the ledger, and we do not learn that the KKK’s party was the Democratic Party.

Father Coughlin is entered into the right side of the ledger as a prefigurement of the dangerous demagogue Weiss wants to make President Trump out to be. Yet, if she had consulted Jonah Goldberg, at least before he was undone by the 2016 electorate, she would know that this is a mistake. Father Coughlin was far more of a leftist. He hated the KKK because they hated Roman Catholics, but he advocated for FDR and state control of the economy.

In painting the standard liberal left picture of populism and nationalism leading up to World War II, Weiss smuggled in the assumption that Nazism was of the far right, when Jonah Goldberg showed many years ago now that:

The Nazis’ ultimate aim was to transform both the left and the right, to advance a “Third Way” that broke with both categories. But in the real world the Nazis seized control of the country by dividing, conquering, and then replacing the left. [ Liberal Fascism, p.70]

At the heart of this chapter is President Trump, and his supporters, who Bari Weiss paints in all the ugly and false terms one expects of a New York Times writer. Her perceptions were certainly not contradicted by those on the conservative side who she acknowledged:

In our collective fight against anti-Semitism, I am grateful to be connected to . . . Meghan McCain . . . . And to have deepened my friendships with . . . David French . . . .

While Weiss believes she is proceeding fairly, reasonably, her circle of friends and advisers cited are well within the left and anti-Trump establishments. Missing from her list of friends and allies are such names as Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, and Jonah Goldberg. She name-checks Ben Shapiro as another public figure who has been deluged with vile anti-Semitism online, but even though her previous job was with the Wall Street Journal, Ben Shapiro is probably too politically toxic in her professional circles. The same likely holds for Dennis Prager, who just happens to be the co-author of a 2003 book, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. In short, those on and off her acknowledgments list help explain her tone-deafness to how her choice of words misdirect threat perceptions and reinforce divisions rather than build a broader defense against violent anti-Semitism, including ultimately genocidal hatred of Israel.

Not far enough left?

Bari Weiss showed journalistic courage in turning a light on the left as a source of anti-Semitism. She points out the path Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has taken, both in its direct anti-Semitism and in its alliance with radical Islam. The result has been a movement of the Labour Party to the extreme left. Weiss names Rep. Ilhan Omar and the Squad, and points to the Democratic Party’s failure to reject or discipline Omar in their party. Weiss even calls out President Obama on one point, criticizing his outrageous circumlocutions about the attack in France on a Jewish deli.

In providing context for the current threat on the left, Weiss never mentions Woodrow Wilson as an instigator of the modern KKK. She is silent on FDR and the Holocaust. Both of these Democratic Party giants also imprisoned many thousands on suspicion of disloyalty during war. See Johan Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, generally, on both of these presidents.

Of course, to bring up FDR, who Father Coughlin supported, would be to open the door to questions about her current employer. The New York Times and its owner covered themselves in disgrace with suppression of credible reports of the Holocaust. They had earlier been all but the American branch office of Pravda during the Holodomor and the Great Terror. Two weeks before How to Fight Anti-Semitism was published, another book, very relevant to this portion of Weiss’s argument, was published: The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust.

The Jews Should Keep Quiet further reveals how FDR’s personal relationship with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, American Jewry’s foremost leader in the 1930s and 1940s, swayed the U.S. response to the Holocaust. Documenting how Roosevelt and others pressured Wise to stifle American Jewish criticism of FDR’s policies, Medoff chronicles how and why the American Jewish community largely fell in line with Wise. Ultimately Medoff weighs the administration’s realistic options for rescue action, which, if taken, would have saved many lives.

The New York Times, in its Holocaust coverage during the war, was part of that establishment effort, to hide the full truth and keep everyone on the side of the FDR administration.

The publisher at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his family were members of the “our crowd” German Jews in this country, and they didn’t want to alienate the powers that be in government and business. So questions of Jewish identity were often diluted in the paper’s pages, lest the Sulzbergers be seen as being on the “pro-Jewish” side. A conscious decision was made from the top to downplay stories which might give the impression that The Times was a “Jewish newspaper.”

Today, apparently, questions are not to be asked of a newspaper that publishes blatant, classic anti-Semitic cartoons. Nor are questions to be asked of Michelle Obama, who may be the Democrats’ future nominee. While the long streak of attacks on Jewish men in Brooklyn are seen on film to be perpetrated by young black men, no one is to raise questions about African-American anti-Semitism, personified in Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, and Jeremiah Wright, in whose church Barack and Michelle Obama sat for all those years.

Jews being hit with rocks. Jews being chased down and punched. Jews being beaten with belts. Jews being stabbed on the street. Jewish school buses being set on fire. Jewish women having their wigs ripped off. Swastikas being painted on sidewalks. Jews being forced to take off their kippot. These are scenes that could be straight out of 1940s Nazi Germany, or perhaps from France today, but they’re not. These recent assaults have all happened in Brooklyn, New York. The worst part is, no one seems to care.

See my earlier piece on Jamestown 1619 for more detail on the disgraceful response by local Democratic politicians and media. Further, consider the behavior of the New York Times since World War II, including in the middle of Weiss’s book project. Deborah E. Lipstadt started a review of Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel, 1896-2016:

In late April 2019, the New York Times international edition published a cartoon depicting a blind, kippa-wearing President Trump being led by a dachshund with a Jewish star around its neck. The dog’s face was a distorted caricature of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visage. The message was indisputable: Israelis qua Jews, despite being the national equivalent of lapdogs, have the unique ability to blind presidents and shape political events. Beguiled, not only does Trump do their bidding, but he is, like the other unwitting victims on the world stage, blissfully unaware of what is going on. The cartoon gave vivid expression to the conspiracy theory, or rather myth, that is at the heart of anti-Semitism and did so in an image that, as was widely noted, could have appeared in Der Stürmer. How did it end up receiving the New York Times’s imprimatur?

Bret Stephens, another columnist recruited to the New York Times from the Wall Street Journal, clearly denounced his own paper.

Imagine, for instance, if the dog on a leash in the image hadn’t been the Israeli prime minister but instead a prominent woman such as Nancy Pelosi, a person of color such as John Lewis, or a Muslim such as Ilhan Omar. Would that have gone unnoticed by either the wire service that provides the Times with images or the editor who, even if he were working in haste, selected it? The question answers itself. And it raises a follow-on: How have even the most blatant expressions of anti-Semitism become almost undetectable to editors who think it’s part of their job to stand up to bigotry?

So, Bari Weiss already had some evidence that she could put her employer’s publication under critical scrutiny without losing her job. Since the infamous New York Times cartoon was published in late April of 2019, there was time to consider the paper’s responses in the fuller context Weiss sought to apply to other current actors and incidents.

The Times faced increased backlash after their non-apology and was forced to issue a new statement claiming the paper was “deeply sorry” after a white nationalist terrorist opened fire at a synagogue in California on Saturday, killing one and injuring three others.

“We are deeply sorry for the publication of an anti-Semitic political cartoon last Thursday in the print edition of The New York Times that circulates outside of the United States, and we are committed to making sure nothing like this happens again,” The Times said in a new statement. “Such imagery is always dangerous, and at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide, it’s all the more unacceptable.”

Were it not for the white nationalist, and the need to attack President Trump with clean hands, would Bari Weiss’s employer ever have made the revised and extended apology? There was time, especially with this book’s format, to include the Times April cartoon as an instance of the link between the left and radical Islam.

In citing authority for the problem of the left’s near singular focus on Israel as a villain, Bari Weiss quotes Susan Rice instead of Nikki Haley:

[A]s Susan Rice put it less poetically but just as clearly: “No country is immune to criticism, nor should it be. But when that criticism take the form of singling out just one country, unfairly, bitterly, and relentlessly, over and over and over, that’s just wrong—and we all know it.” [106-7]

Weiss could have had the same and better from Haley, but that would raise questions about Trump and Obama. Why is this choice especially problematic? Weiss is silent on Susan Rice, as President Obama’s U.N. Ambassador, engineering the U.S. abstention, on a vote only days before President Trump took office, so the rest of the Security Council could pass the infamous U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, declaring Israeli settlements illegal. So, Weiss might just wonder if Susan Rice and her old boss were a bigger part of the problem on the left. Are the moves in American politics, against Jews and Israel since 2018, a continuation of what President Obama set in motion in 2009?

Naming radical Islam:

Bari Weiss gives an accurate account of the reemergence of dangerous enmity towards Jews (and Christians) from Muslims in the Middle East, radiating out to the world. She starts with an account of medieval Roman Catholic Europe generating blood libels that excused large scale murders of Jews, and claims:

until the twentieth century, it was Christianity that was responsible for the murder of more Jews than any other ideology on the planet.

We do not have good enough records to compare the pagan Roman empire, or earlier pagan conquests, each with their own ideology, if Christianity is an ideology, but the point should be taken. At the same time Weiss does not whitewash the systemic oppression in the Islamic world, under a form of legal segregation and discrimination called dhimmitude. By this account, it is Western Christian European empires, in the 19th Century that brought their virulent blood libel accounts into the Islamic world, and the Islamic world was already fertile soil.

Once majority Muslim societies experienced Christians and Jews empowered not to submit to dhimmi status, the reaction was extreme. Contrary to self-flattering secular Western intellectuals’ belief, more education brings with it deeper anti-Semitism, through reading and connecting texts supporting an account linking abandonment of the old-time religion with decline in material and political success. Weiss points out that the same thing actually happened in Germany leading up to the Nazi regime. While she does not make this claim, beliefs of Prussian, then greater German, superiority and rights to more territory, lebensraum, was observed at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century.

Weiss believes in America, as a unique solution that has allowed Catholics and Protestants, who once slaughtered each other in religious wars, to brunch together. That same American system was relatively hospitable to Jews, living in their faith, from the founding, as Weiss recounts. She also holds to a positive assessment of the European Enlightenment, and the related modernizing or moderating of both Christianity and Judaism. This may be another unexamined Western secular elite myth, assuming that education and modernity bring skepticism and bending of religion, rather than the world being put under the lens of religious texts and teachings.

This all passed for uncontroversial opinion until recently. Now, however, Weiss is speaking secular heresy, as any moderately aware observer of our time knows. Weiss dares call anti-Zionism, as it is actually practiced, anti-Semitism, and challenges the weaponization of intersectional theory in the service of anti-Semitism. The response from the left was swift and strongly negative, as several reviews below illustrate.

Of course, riding the intersectional social justice tiger is tricky. The Forward was harsh in its treatment of Bari Weiss, yet their opinion editor just experienced the inconvenient truth Weiss wrote: there is no separating anti-Zionist agitation from Jew-hatred:

[Forward opinion editor Batya] Ungar-Sargon was asked to speak at the conference hosted by Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center, where she was to be part of a discussion on “Racism and Zionism: Black-Jewish Relations.” Prior to that, she was slated to take part in another panel that was to discuss anti-Semitism along with Harvard University scholar Ruth Wisse and a Holocaust survivor. Students for Justice for Palestine, a group that actively promotes the BDS movement and which engages in anti-Semitic incitement, planned to protest at the conference. But what threw Ungar-Sargon for a loop was that these opponents of Israel weren’t going to be satisfied with protesting at the session about Zionism but would first seek to disrupt the one about anti-Semitism.

The chapter on extremism in Islam is the one that most signaled the need for notes and references. It was here that Bari Weiss’s strength as a columnist worked most against her as a book writer. The book would have been strengthened by even a two-page appendix of suggested readings and internet resources for each chapter.

Review of reviews:

Bari Weiss’s effort to speak inconvenient truths to all sides was not well received by her own side. Both Slate and the New York Times were not kind. It seemed to go downhill from there on the left, in the Forward, the Nation, and JewishCurrents. She got a more sympathetic view from across the pond at the Observer, and from National Review because of their agreement that President Trump is horrible and that he is responsible for destroying our civic discourse and politics, not those who have sought to nullify the 2016 election. Finally, I comment on your reading reviews by Cathy Young and Melissa Langsam Braunstein.

Jordan Weissmann at Slate attacked Bari Weiss’s research and her focus:

Bari Weiss’ new book on combating hatred of Jews in the Trump era is more interested in condemning the left than actually confronting the problem.

[…]

Here are a few things that a journalist might want to do if she were attempting to write a good and worthwhile book titled How to Fight Anti-Semitism.

The journalist could carefully explore the online radicalization process that leads men to violent white supremacy, and detail possible ways to curb it. She could talk to students involved in the campus boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement to more clearly understand their motivations, before unpacking whether or when the effort is anti-Semitic. She could go to Crown Heights in New York, where a long history of tension between the black and Hasidic communities has lately erupted into violence against the neighborhood’s Jews, and perhaps interview local leaders trying to bridge those divides. She could explore why American schools are doing a miserable job teaching the Holocaust and how that affects discourse about Jews and Israel.

The New York Times review by Hillel Halkin of How to Fight Anti-Semitism goes right at Bari Weiss’s core beliefs about the natural fit between Jewish identity and history and the liberal left. The reviewer directly attacks Judaism’s history from an intersectional politics perspective:

Weiss approvingly quotes a friend of hers, hurt to the quick by the proposed banning of “Jewish pride flags” at the 2019 Washington Dyke March. Always? As if the right to define oneself sexually as one pleases were a cause Jews have fought for over the ages!

As a matter of historical record, it was Greek and Roman high society, not the Jews, that practiced and preached polymorphous sexual freedom. Judaism fiercely opposed such an acceptance of sexual diversity, against which it championed the procreative family, the taming of anarchic passions, and the cosmically ordained nature of normative gender distinctions that goes back to the first chapter of Genesis: “So God created man in his own image. … Male and female created he them.” And while we’re at it, it was the Greeks, not the Jews, who invented democracy. What mattered to Jews throughout nearly all of their history (and still does to a considerable number of them today) was the will of God as interpreted by religious authority, not free elections.

Judaism as liberalism with a prayer shawl is a distinctly modern development. It started with the 19th-century Reform movement in Germany, from which it spread to America with the reinforcement of the left-wing ideals of the Russian Jewish labor movement. As much as such a conception of their ancestors’ faith has captured the imagination of most American Jews, it is hard to square with 3,000 years of Jewish tradition.

Tell it to Greek and Roman women. That “sexual freedom” was for the powerful, like today’s Afghan warlords with their pubescent boys. I learned that truth indirectly from translated Greek classics long before intersectionality was a thing. We read to understand the art and thought of the time, as progenitor to our “Western Civilization,” not for the sexual politics, but there were the powerful men with their young male objects of desire.

There was real debate over the morality, the ethics of elite sexual behavior at the time, debate clear in the literature, but it was the successful spread of Christianity, which came out of Judaism, that imposed limits on men’s appetites. Nevertheless, the New York Times makes clear the intersectional hierarchy and places both Christianity and Judaism, as a religion, in the position of privileged oppressors.

These were the good reviews from the left. It got a lot uglier with Talia Lavin at the Nation:

As a Jewish woman who has faced the same anti-Semitic harassment as Weiss and who has felt twinges of discomfort in leftist spaces, I found myself doubly frustrated: I had genuinely hoped to locate some commonality in struggle with this woman who claims to be my sister in it. Yet the profound lack of intellectual curiosity, proportionality, and material analysis in the book renders it worse than simply useless. Instead of being the jagged, urgent cri de coeur Weiss imagines herself to have written, the book suffers from the limitations of one particularly sophistic opinion columnist. I have written numerous op-eds in my time, and while the form is excellent for advancing a polemic or highlighting some facet of a broader problem, it does not lend itself to a book-length analysis of one of the knottiest issues in the modern world. Weiss is in the business of delivering weekly hits of dopamine to a right-of-center readership, and perhaps those readers will enjoy a book that offers more of the same. But readers who seek a more robust and rigorous analysis of contemporary anti-Semitism are advised to look elsewhere.

Right-of-center? Talya Zax at the Forward attacks both the general thrust of the book and especially her look at radical Islam:

Despite the preponderance of space Weiss gives to analyzing what she sees as the landscape of contemporary anti-Semitism, her book isn’t actually about ringing an alarm bell. What it’s fundamentally interested in is providing reassurance: No, we aren’t making this up, yes, we have the power to fight, yes, the other side is delusional — even though yours is, too. Most consoling of all, the solution comes through embracing our identity, by having confidence in our values and bravery in applying them. “Trust your discomfort,” Weiss advises. “Don’t trust people who seek to divide Jews. Even if they are Jews.” And: “Never, ever forget to love your neighbor.” And: “Choose life.”

[…]

The dangers of that perspective are most apparent in the book’s chapter on “Radical Islam,” and specifically in Weiss’s insistence on using the term “Islamist.” That term technically refers to Muslims who believe that Islam ought to be the strongest political force in a country, but in common American parlance generally refers to extremists bent on establishing fully Islamic states. Yet Weiss uses it to apply to every instance she cites of an alleged anti-Semitic attack by someone of Arab origin, and to the problem of Muslim anti-Semitism at large. These instances follow a familiar pattern, she writes, beginning when “An Islamist does something terrible.” “It is very hard,” she writes, “to absorb the extent of Islamist anti-Semitism in Europe.”

Judith Butler naturally was unhappy with the whole project, especially Bari Weiss’s criticism of the reality of intersectional politics and of questioning the existence of Israel.

Weiss’s book turned out to be both passionate and disappointing. She repeats her urgent pleas for the reader to wake up and avert a recurrence of a nightmarish history. At the same time, she does not take up the issues that make the matter so vexed for those who oppose both antisemitism and the unjust policies of the Israeli state. To do that, she would have had to provide a history of antisemitism, and account for the relatively recent emergence of the view that to criticize Israel is itself antisemitic. To fight antisemitism we have to know what it is, how best to identify its forms, and how to devise strategies for rooting it out. The book falters precisely because it refuses to do so. Instead, it elides a number of ethical and historical questions, suggesting that we are meant to feel enraged opposition to antisemitism at the expense of understanding it.

[…]

Weiss makes clear that there can be criticisms of Israel that are legitimate, but only if they take the form of demanding that Israel live up to its higher ideals. Under such conditions, we are barely permitted to ask the more fundamental question: what political form would lead to the flourishing of all the people who now lay claim to that land?

[…]

And yet another line of history runs through and past the Naqba, a history that intersects with the story Weiss tells: state Zionism provided sanctuary for Jewish refugees even as it dispossessed more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, producing more refugees for whom there is no clear sanctuary. 1948 was a year in which multiple histories intersected. There is no one line of history. If we accept wholesale Weiss’s proposition that Israel exists and is therefore legitimate, then we are excused from asking too many historical questions about why it was established in the way that it was—on what legal terms, and at what price, and through the vanquishing of what alternative possibilities.

At the Guardian, a British paper of the left, Yehudah Mirsky praised Bari Weiss’s effort generally, before using the occasion to go where the left wants to go, targeting Donald Trump and evangelical Christians, along with the majority of voters in Israel:

Loosely written, going not deep but wide, she brings together trends whose crisscrossing makes for much current confusion. And her observations generally ring true. Her taking aim at both right and left will infuriate some but is on the mark. What, for Weiss, is antisemitism? “An ever-morphing conspiracy theory in which Jews play the starring role in spreading evil in the world.”

[…]

Enter today’s conspiracist-in-chief. Calling Donald Trump antisemitic mistakes him for someone with beliefs. Rather, stereotypes that make Jews’ flesh creep – greedy, power-hungry, tribal, ruthless – are his idea of virtues. Demagogic egomaniacs like him are Jew-haters’ natural friends. His relentless assaults on minorities’ rights, free speech and the rule of law strike at the very things that for most American Jews are not only strategic pillars but deep articles of faith.

Trump’s version of pro-Israel policy is meant to please not the majority of American Jews, most of whom side more with Israel’s center-left, but the harder-line and Orthodox and, above all, evangelicals, whose professed love for Jews is, it often seems, not so far from its opposite.

[…]

Jews met this strange, frightening new hatred in different ways: religious retrenchment or, alternatively, reform, political liberalism, socialism, nationalism – and Zionism, which mixed and matched with them all. Ironically, the sheer diversity of Jewish responses to modernity’s dangers and opportunities, with Jews on all sides of the ideological barricades, set fevered imaginations wild.

Brian Steward at National Review took to Bari Weiss’s book like catnip, predictably taking the same course as their counterparts in the Observer:

As Weiss is fully aware, her book is most apt to court controversy by providing a political guide to these fresh outbreaks of anti-Semitism. She begins rather dauntingly by noting that Jews in the West, especially in Europe, are confronted by a “three-headed dragon.” First, there is an antagonistic environment for Jews, thanks in large measure to the rapid growth of Islamism on the Old Continent. Second, there is ideological vilification by the political Left, which increasingly regards Israel as an illegitimate state serving no other purpose than as a bastion of Western (read: white) colonialism. Third, there is a recrudescence of reactionary populism on the political right that, while often professing sympathy for Israel, evinces a fervent commitment to blood-and-soil politics that seldom ends well for Jews.

Not everybody will agree with Weiss’s portrait of the hydra-headed enemy, which itself points to part of the problem. The tribal impulse in our political life has grown so pronounced that it has overwhelmed a common civic culture, rendering many classical liberals politically homeless. There is a well-oiled habit among the political class and in the press of excusing obvious, often deplorable, transgressions by one’s “own” side. The acid test for fighting anti-Semitism, as with so many other derangements, is to face it down with equal enthusiasm and commitment when it flares up on one’s team — or, better yet, to be more discriminating about which team one belongs to in the first place.

[…]

In addition to being more diffuse than many imagine, the lunatic fringe is also thicker than is generally understood. Weiss is justly concerned by the spike in violence against Jews and other minorities from the identitarian right and about the grisly ideology behind it. After some years of dormancy, in August 2017 it flared into the open in Charlottesville when a “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists gathered at the University of Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Carrying tiki torches, these doughy goons shouted the slogans: “Blood and soil,” “White Lives Matter,” and, in a nod to the ancient anti-Semitic notion of the Jew as the evil puppeteer, “Jews will not replace us.” Lest we forget, President Trump’s reflexive response to this wicked nonsense was to put in a good word for such “very fine people.”

That last sentence is a lie. National Review knows it is a lie. Now pay close attention to the conclusion:

If the populist-nationalist view of Israel continues to dominate the right side of the ballot in both Israel and America, and if that view continues to command electoral majorities, it will help vindicate the Left’s suspicion that Israel is in essence an ethnocracy, or will soon evolve into one. As progressive politics lurches to the left, the Israeli Right will find new support in subverting democratic institutions and entrenching the occupation. In place of a smaller, plucky Israel punching above its weight against fearsome enemies while upholding a laudable multiethnic democracy, the cycle of dueling left and right populisms risks helping to foster a Greater Israel that loses sight of the liberal Zionism that birthed it. If this comes to pass, it will be a moral and political catastrophe, no matter where America’s embassy in Israel is situated.

Never mind that Israel was recast as oppressor by the left in the early 1970s, after the economic class warfare gambit failed in the 1960s. Arabs became the virtuous victims of colonization by the victorious Israeli colonizers. The deplorables of Israel and America, as they dare to elect the wrong people, are to blame, according the National Review‘s review of How to Fight Anti-Semitism.

Melissa Langsam Braunstein, with the Federalist, offers an even-handed review. You should really go and read her review after what I have written.

Weiss deserves credit for calling out not only “the Squad,” but also President Obama’s response to the attack on Paris’ Hyper Cacher supermarket, which he pretended was random rather than anti-Semitic. However, the example I wish she had used was President Obama’s handling of opponents to the Iran deal.

I would also have added The New York Times shamefully discussing Iran deal opponents in reference to their districts’ Jewish populations. Lest anyone miss those statistics, The Times highlighted the figures in yellow, recalling the Nazi-era yellow star. If we’re going to speak honestly about how we arrived at this moment, it’s important to acknowledge not only what’s happened since 2016, but also what happened the year before.

[…]

The closest I found to an explanation of Trump’s antisemitic remarks were three examples offered 18 pages earlier. One example is a behind-the-scenes insult from Michael Wolff’s first book about the Trump White House. So is the anecdote definitely true? I know not.

The other two were comments Trump made at Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) events (one of which I covered for The Federalist), which sound terrible out of context. However, as a Jewish conservative familiar with those gatherings having joined the RJC decades ago, I’d say those examples mostly underscore the gap between how Jews in those rooms heard Trump’s words and how liberal journalists chose to cover them.

To maximize the impact of this chapter, especially for conservative readers, I would have selected different examples. The two times President Trump has made comments related to Jews that have concerned (at least some, if not all) Jewish conservatives were his response to Charlottesville and his recent remarks about Jewish disloyalty. The first emphasized the president’s unwillingness to definitively tell off his alt-right fanbois, while the latter saw him dipping into anti-Semitic language.

Cathy Young comes at the book from a different viewpoint, but is similarly fair-minded:

In fact, Weiss has written a smart, thoughtful book that defends increasingly embattled liberal values. That means it has something to offend both major political tribes right now. It’s pro-Israel and against the “social justice” progressivism currently dominant on the left. It’s also resolutely against the populist/nativist ideology prevalent on the right. It’s against “The Squad” and against Donald Trump.

How to Fight Anti-Semitism is a thin book without endnotes (and one that, at times, could have used a bit more explanation and sourcing), but it does a remarkably good job of examining the three main strands of anti-Semitism today: right-wing, left-wing, and Islamist.

[…]

Civility?

It should be clear that I do not share Young’s assessment of the book and, at least in part, of the author. Way back in 2010, Dennis Prager wrote:

Liberal Jewish columnist Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote recently that Tea Partiers had engaged in a “small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.” The November 1938 Kristallnacht (“Night of the Broken Glass”), with its murdered Jews, broken and vandalized Jewish businesses and homes, and burned-down synagogues, is widely considered to be the opening act of the Holocaust.

[…]

Where liberal and conservative Jews differ is where each group thinks the greatest danger to the Jews lies. Jews on the Left are certain that the greatest threats to Jews come from the Right. Conservative and centrist Jews believe that dangers to the Jews can come from the Left, from the Right, from Islam, from a renewal of Christian anti-Semitism, indeed from anywhere, but that at this moment the world’s Left is far more an enemy of the Jewish people than the world’s, not to mention America’s, Right.

Yes, the Tea Party was being compared to Nazis when these good citizens dared politely stand up and civilly protect the bipartisan crazy deficit spending, driving our national debt into a near vertical climb. “Clinging to their guns and God?” “Basket of deplorables?” Who was really being uncivil in their discourse? Though the book and in her speaking appearances, Bari Weiss shows a consistent lack of self-awareness:

…Weiss, who describes herself as center-left politically and holds pro-Israel views that include criticisms of the Jewish state, went on to speak about her own family’s wrestling with the politics of the day, with her sisters and her mother not allowing their “Trump-curious” father to vote for Donald Trump for president in 2016.

“We prevented him from voting for Trump, and he wrote [on his ballot] Steph Curry [the NBA star]. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next election, especially if it’s Bernie [Sanders] or Elizabeth Warren [as the Democratic candidate],” Weiss said. “I think a lot of Jews could be writing in Steph Curry.”

Weiss said while she supports Trump’s relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, his scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal and his recognition of Israeli control over the Golan Heights, Trump’s disregard for civil discourse has had a poisonous effect on the country.

Yet, Bari Weiss calls Congresswoman, and U.S. Army major, Tulsi Gabbardan Assad toady [language warning].” On camera, she spelled it “t-o-a-d-i-e” when asking for someone to look up the meaning, after Joe Rogan asked her what she meant. In the book, she goes with -y, and offers precious little justification beyond the vague hand-waving she offered on air. Of course, this is perfectly acceptable in the Democrat media complex bubble, as the New York Times and CNN proved together in the lead-up to the October Democratic Presidential primary debate sponsored by CNN.

Oh, and many Ricochet readers and me? When I had just finished reading How to Fight Anti-Semitism, I mentioned it to a friend. He expressed interest and I handed him the book copy, brand new from the library, only ever read by me. He opened it towards the middle and this is what he read:

When the president of the party of Lincoln praises Robert E. Lee as a “great general,” they hear the whistle. When the president talks not about patriotism but about nationalism, they hear the whistle. When he denigrates immigrants and declares “America first,” they hear the whistle loud and clear. [p.63]

“Dog whistles!? She’s going with dog whistles?” he exclaimed derisively, snapping the book shut and thrusting it back to me. I could not disagree.

In the end, Bari Weiss may be in the position of the young stock-trader woman after the 1984 election. The woman was completely unashamed to tell a news periodical that she was so thankful that President Reagan was so far ahead in the polls because that let her vote for Mondale to feel good about herself. Weiss, her sisters, and mother can gang up on her father again, and maybe even join him in voting for some socially acceptable sports figure, safe in the knowledge that the object of her fear and loathing will secure real safety for another few years. At the same time, it may be up to us to pick up the pieces of a political culture that she and her fellow leftists and TruCon lapdogs, not we, helped imperil, as both Peter Robinson and Kimberly Strassel explain.

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  1. Clifford A. Brown Member
    Clifford A. Brown
    @CliffordBrown

    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… (View Comment):

    aardo vozz (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    I’m sorry to hear this Jerry. Accusation of anti-Semitism is widely overused compared to what? How much would be sufficient to make an issue of it? And I think considering the 2,000 year history of anti-Semitism, comparing it to racism and sexism which are modern phenomena is naive and unfair.

    Not to nit-pick, Susan, but I think we’re talking about a history of anti-Semitism that goes back well over three thousand years. It wasn’t always fun times with the Pharoahs.🙂

    I must be feeling really disagreeable today. Sorry about that.

    The idea that there is a unique history of anti-Semitism is incorrect. Everybody has been fighting everybody else, for millenia. The Israelites had it rough in Egypt. They were pretty rough on the Amalekites, and the Midianites, and the Canaanites, and the Philistines, and many others. And their enemies were rough on them, and on each other. The Israelites had plenty of civil wars, too, such as the slaughter of the Benjamites, and the civil war between David and Ish-bosheth, and the rebellion of Absalom, and the rebellion of Sheba, and Jehu’s war against Ahab.

    By the way, Elijah slaughtered the priests of Baal, and Josiah did the same. There were several times that the Israelites nearly wiped out entire cities, or even small nations.

    History is a bloodbath. There is nothing unusual about the suffering of the Jews, except that after becoming stateless as a result of failed rebellions against Rome, they did not have a victory until 1948. Rome, by the way, was quite tolerant of the Jewish faith.

    Look at England, just as an example. Roman conquest; Anglo-Saxon invasion; internal warfare; Danish invasion; more internal warfare; Norman conquest; more internal warfare and the French wars; the Scottish wars; multiple civil wars, including the War of the Roses and the English Civil War; the Napoleonic Wars; the Blitz.

    Most places had it much tougher than England. My ancestors were Poles and southern Italians. They had it really, really rough, too. So what? What is the point of playing a game of “my ancestors were more oppressed than your ancestors”?

    The claim of unique Jewish suffering is not true. Everybody suffered. But few other groups keep alive such historic grievances, as a basis for claims of special privilege or special treatment today.

    I am glad that the Jews have survived as a people. I am utterly confident that they will continue to do so, as Biblical prophecy includes a very important role for many Jews at the end times. I am glad that they have Israel as a refuge, and the US, too.

    But this claim of unique historic victimization is precisely the narrative that most of us object to among the Wokeists. False accusations of anti-Semitism may stoke actual anti-Semitism, just as false accusations of racism may stoke understandable racial resentment on the part of whites.

    I am unaware of recurring claims, across centuries and nations, that Poles, WASPs, Irish, French,Spanish…were part of grand cabals to control and ruin local societies.

    I think there is a bit more interesting case to be made looking at Thomas Sowell’s work, Race and Culture: A World View, which includes Chinese and Indians isolated in other cultures and both desired and hated/feared for economic and educational success. However, there is no history of other peoples seeking to eradicate these people groups repeatedly, and certainly nothing like the 3rd Reich, willingly abetted by multiple peoples across Europe, followed by 1948, 1967, 1973—all three intended wars of annihilation.

    • #31
  2. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    BTW, “Wokeists” don’t like Israel or Jews. I don’t know how they got into the conversation. 

    • #32
  3. aardo vozz Member
    aardo vozz
    @aardovozz

    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… (View Comment):

    I must be feeling really disagreeable today. Sorry about that.

    The idea that there is a unique history of anti-Semitism is incorrect. Everybody has been fighting everybody else, for millenia. The Israelites had it rough in Egypt. They were pretty rough on the Amalekites, and the Midianites, and the Canaanites, and the Philistines, and many others. And their enemies were rough on them, and on each other. The Israelites had plenty of civil wars, too, such as the slaughter of the Benjamites, and the civil war between David and Ish-bosheth, and the rebellion of Absalom, and the rebellion of Sheba, and Jehu’s war against Ahab.

    By the way, Elijah slaughtered the priests of Baal, and Josiah did the same. There were several times that the Israelites nearly wiped out entire cities, or even small nations.

    History is a bloodbath. There is nothing unusual about the suffering of the Jews, except that after becoming stateless as a result of failed rebellions against Rome, they did not have a victory until 1948. Rome, by the way, was quite tolerant of the Jewish faith.

    Look at England, just as an example. Roman conquest; Anglo-Saxon invasion; internal warfare; Danish invasion; more internal warfare; Norman conquest; more internal warfare and the French wars; the Scottish wars; multiple civil wars, including the War of the Roses and the English Civil War; the Napoleonic Wars; the Blitz.

    Most places had it much tougher than England. My ancestors were Poles and southern Italians. They had it really, really rough, too. So what? What is the point of playing a game of “my ancestors were more oppressed than your ancestors”?

    The claim of unique Jewish suffering is not true. Everybody suffered. But few other groups keep alive such historic grievances, as a basis for claims of special privilege or special treatment today.

    I am glad that the Jews have survived as a people. I am utterly confident that they will continue to do so, as Biblical prophecy includes a very important role for many Jews at the end times. I am glad that they have Israel as a refuge, and the US, too.

    But this claim of unique historic victimization is precisely the narrative that most of us object to among the Wokeists. False accusations of anti-Semitism may stoke actual anti-Semitism, just as false accusations of racism may stoke understandable racial resentment on the part of whites.

     

    I’m not claiming uniqueness of Jews being objects of hate or persecution, just length of time. 

    • #33
  4. Clifford A. Brown Member
    Clifford A. Brown
    @CliffordBrown

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    BTW, “Wokeists” don’t like Israel or Jews. I don’t know how they got into the conversation. 

    Yes. As I wrote:

    Of course, riding the intersectional social justice tiger is tricky. The Forward was harsh in its treatment of Bari Weiss, yet their opinion editor just experienced the inconvenient truth Weiss wrote: there is no separating anti-Zionist agitation from Jew-hatred:

    [Forward opinion editor Batya] Ungar-Sargon was asked to speak at the conference hosted by Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center, where she was to be part of a discussion on “Racism and Zionism: Black-Jewish Relations.” Prior to that, she was slated to take part in another panel that was to discuss anti-Semitism along with Harvard University scholar Ruth Wisse and a Holocaust survivor. Students for Justice for Palestine, a group that actively promotes the BDS movement and which engages in anti-Semitic incitement, planned to protest at the conference. But what threw Ungar-Sargon for a loop was that these opponents of Israel weren’t going to be satisfied with protesting at the session about Zionism but would first seek to disrupt the one about anti-Semitism.

    Read the rest of the linked article for more details.

    • #34
  5. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    @cliffordbrown – Ungar-Sargon’s account of what happened at Bard is disputed.  The protest was about one of the members of the panel, Ruth Wisse:

    Adam Shatz, a staff writer with the London Review of Books who also spoke at the conference, describes Wisse to me as “a notorious anti-Arab racist and unconditional defender of Israel and its occupation.” Regarding the protest, Shatz adds, “It wasn’t Wisse’s identity as a Jew, or for that matter as an opponent of antisemitism, that was being challenged so much as her record of racism and her unconditional support of Israel.”

    Or more pointedly:

    Student protesters state that Wisse’s Islamophobia is entirely relevant to her treatment of the subject of antisemitism. “If it were not for the fact that Ruth Wisse has a history of saying horrid things about Palestinians and Muslims, I might agree that protesting her under the banner of Students for Justice in Palestine was antisemitic,” says Akiva Hirsch, one of the student protesters, who is Jewish. “But the fact of the matter is, Ruth Wisse has said terrible, racist, Islamophobic things. Nobody who says things like […] ‘all Palestinians do is breed, bleed, and advertise their misery’ deserves any platform, let alone an academic one to discuss bigotry.”

    Maybe?

    (I actually am not convinced that it’s a good thing to protest someone for what they said many years ago, but if students have a right to protest Farrakhan for his comments about Jews  without it being automatically labelled racist [and I think that they do], then they have the right to similarly protest Wisse.)

    The article helpfully included a link to….a video of the actual discussion….if anybody wants to check some of the claims and counterclaims.

    Wisse’s writing on the subject is interesting, imo, though while she defines what antisemitism is, and how it conflates with antizionism and functions in the Middle East, its role in North America is less clearly defined.

    • #35
  6. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    BTW, “Wokeists” don’t like Israel or Jews. I don’t know how they got into the conversation.

    Gary, you’re misconstruing Jerry somewhat. The relationship that overused charges of antisemitism has to overused charges of the other “isms” was exactly Jerry’s point, and he’s making that point in relation to the earlier point about being skeptical of statistics like these or even of organizations who inclined to treat all data as a nail to the organization’s hammer. I think Jerry is saying that on some ways the AOL is becoming another member of the “woke” coalition even including the stretching of formerly useful terms to the point of sometimes even weaponizing them. 

    I don’t know if that’s the case, but my observation of the era 2015-present tells me that it’s not a crazy idea. Many organizations and terms have become stretched and weaponized. Mostly falsely and in a way unhelpful to the real cases those terms and organizations were intended for.

    That’s how “wokeists” got into the conversation.

    • #36
  7. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    Clifford A. Brown (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    BTW, “Wokeists” don’t like Israel or Jews. I don’t know how they got into the conversation.

    Yes. As I wrote:

    Of course, riding the intersectional social justice tiger is tricky. The Forward was harsh in its treatment of Bari Weiss, yet their opinion editor just experienced the inconvenient truth Weiss wrote: there is no separating anti-Zionist agitation from Jew-hatred:

    [Forward opinion editor Batya] Ungar-Sargon was asked to speak at the conference hosted by Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center, where she was to be part of a discussion on “Racism and Zionism: Black-Jewish Relations.” Prior to that, she was slated to take part in another panel that was to discuss anti-Semitism along with Harvard University scholar Ruth Wisse and a Holocaust survivor. Students for Justice for Palestine, a group that actively promotes the BDS movement and which engages in anti-Semitic incitement, planned to protest at the conference. But what threw Ungar-Sargon for a loop was that these opponents of Israel weren’t going to be satisfied with protesting at the session about Zionism but would first seek to disrupt the one about anti-Semitism.

    Read the rest of the linked article for more details.

    I don’t know. Undoubtedly there are those trying to hide their antisemitism behind their antizionism. All though? Even most? When I talk to leftists and the subject of Israel comes up, I don’t get an antisemitic vibe and indeed most those I would talk to would be mortified to think someone attributed antisemitism to them.

    I’m kept I called of the recent, as far as I can tell, equation of anti-Israel as apolitical entity with being anti-Jew.

    Let me also add that I’m skeptical of those who are ant-Israel more generally because I find that leftism is chock a block with the unseldaware, with the shallow, with disingenuousness, and with outright sacrifice of the truth to the bigger narrative.

    • #37
  8. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    Clifford A. Brown (View Comment):
    I am unaware of recurring claims, across centuries and nations, that Poles, WASPs, Irish, French,Spanish…were part of grand cabals to control and ruin local societies.

    This is right. Jerry has a point about antisemitism not being immune from being weaponized and stretched, but antisemitism is unique among the various isms in exactly the way you describe. 

    • #38
  9. Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu Inactive
    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu
    @YehoshuaBenEliyahu

    How can you tell if someone doesn’t like Jews?  It’s easy.  Such a person displays animus towards both Netanyahu and his Jewish critics.  When someone says “I don’t like Trump but I don’t like his Republican critics either,” it’s pretty clear that such a person just doesn’t like Republicans.

    • #39
  10. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… (View Comment):
    We all really need to lighten up.

    I’m not going to address your comments in detail, Jerry, because they are so out of the range of my perceptions. I will say a few things. To only have the ADL to blame for “exaggerating” Jewish issues is not credible to me. We both agree they are on the far left. To try to compare other societies or groups to the long history (3,000 years, as @aardovozz points out) of Jew hatred is simply not true. And your dog cartoons make me ill, for many reasons.

    BTW, even Bret Stephens is right some of the time.

    • #40
  11. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):
    Who says that any criticism of the items you list should be called anti-Semitic? That’s ridiculous.

    Claire Berlinski tried to associate criticism of Soros funding as anti-semitic.

    Trying to seriously understand how the environment in Germany led to WWII is frequently considered anti-semitic.

    Criticizing the passage of anti-free speech laws in Florida that penalize criticism of Israel is anti-semitic.

    There’s a lot of honest questions that can’t be discussed because of anti-semitism.

    • #41
  12. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    aardo vozz (View Comment):
    I’m not claiming uniqueness of Jews being objects of hate or persecution, just length of time.

    They are unique in having maintained their national identity through centuries.

    All the rest of us aren’t allowed to have national identities. And if we think we do, we are thoroughly disabused of the notion of nations even existing. 

    • #42
  13. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Stina (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):
    Who says that any criticism of the items you list should be called anti-Semitic? That’s ridiculous.

    Claire Berlinski tried to associate criticism of Soros funding as anti-semitic.

    Trying to seriously understand how the environment in Germany led to WWII is frequently considered anti-semitic.

    Criticizing the passage of anti-free speech laws in Florida that penalize criticism of Israel is anti-semitic.

    There’s a lot of honest questions that can’t be discussed because of anti-semitism.

    First of all, who stopped people from criticizing Claire? Not only that, Soros has a reputation, long-established, as an anti-Semite. I have never, ever heard that you can’t talk about Germany prior to WWII. There are legions of books on the topic. Why wouldn’t people be willing to discuss it? In fact, many of us Jews hold the Jews of that time accountable for not seeing and acting on the signs of what was coming! Here is the bill you refer to:  Whether you agree with it or not, since it did include anti-Semitic and anti-Israel prohibitions, there was a lot of protest against the bill–by Jews! Here’s the article. So there are two issues: are things unjustly called anti-Semitic, and when they are, do they discourage discussion?

    • #43
  14. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Stina (View Comment):
    All the rest of us aren’t allowed to have national identities. And if we think we do, we are thoroughly disabused of the notion of nations even existing. 

    What does this mean?

    • #44
  15. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Stina (View Comment):
    All the rest of us aren’t allowed to have national identities. And if we think we do, we are thoroughly disabused of the notion of nations even existing.

    What does this mean?

    The anti-nationalist view is that nations never really existed. That we are too intermixed (and always have been) for true nations to truly have any sense of identity. That a nation that has one is lying to themselves or just bigoted – like the polish not wanting refugees in their country.

    It’s especially used against Americans wanting to form a coherent national identity.

    • #45
  16. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Stina (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Stina (View Comment):
    All the rest of us aren’t allowed to have national identities. And if we think we do, we are thoroughly disabused of the notion of nations even existing.

    What does this mean?

    The anti-nationalist view is that nations never really existed. That we are too intermixed (and always have been) for true nations to truly have any sense of identity. That a nation that has one is lying to themselves or just bigoted – like the polish not wanting refugees in their country.

    It’s especially used against Americans wanting to form a coherent national identity.

    Okay. But does that apply somehow to Jews and Israel?

    • #46
  17. aardo vozz Member
    aardo vozz
    @aardovozz

    Stina (View Comment):

    aardo vozz (View Comment):
    I’m not claiming uniqueness of Jews being objects of hate or persecution, just length of time.

    They are unique in having maintained their national identity through centuries.

    All the rest of us aren’t allowed to have national identities. And if we think we do, we are thoroughly disabused of the notion of nations even existing.

    No argument there, and one of th reasons I think we Jews have been hated for so long.

    • #47
  18. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):
    To only have the ADL to blame for “exaggerating” Jewish issues is not credible to me.

    I don’t think he is blaming only the ADL. I think he’s saying that the ADL isn’t immune from the woke times and they have begun to be woke too.

    • #48
  19. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Ed G. (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):
    To only have the ADL to blame for “exaggerating” Jewish issues is not credible to me.

    I don’t think he is blaming only the ADL. I think he’s saying that the ADL isn’t immune from the woke times and they have begun to be woke too.

    I also believe that was the only Jewish organization he quoted.

    • #49
  20. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    I haven’t actually heard much overt anti-Semitic language from the Left, but their longstanding and continuing moral support and sympathy for the enemies of Israel–originally the Palestinian Liberation Organization, then Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the right-of-return fanatics in the Gaza Strip–amounts to the worst kind of anti-Semitism there is.

    • #50
  21. Roosevelt Guck Inactive
    Roosevelt Guck
    @RooseveltGuck

    Does Weiss define anti-Semitism in her book?

    • #51
  22. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Ed G. (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):
    To only have the ADL to blame for “exaggerating” Jewish issues is not credible to me.

    I don’t think he is blaming only the ADL. I think he’s saying that the ADL isn’t immune from the woke times and they have begun to be woke too.

    I also believe that was the only Jewish organization he quoted.

    Was it because someone else referenced the ADL? I’ve lost track.

    • #52
  23. Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… Member
    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio…
    @ArizonaPatriot

    Clifford A. Brown (View Comment):
    I am unaware of recurring claims, across centuries and nations, that Poles, WASPs, Irish, French,Spanish…were part of grand cabals to control and ruin local societies.

    First, there are such recurrent claims.  What do you think is the argument being made by the anti-colonialists?  What do you think is behind the claim for slavery reparations?  What to you think is behind the strange doctrine of multiculturalism, which celebrates every dysfunctional nightmare of a culture on the planet and ostensibly claims that all cultures are equal — except the Western ones, of course, which they hate?

    Indeed, I believe that it was Lenin’s own book that claimed that the European colonial powers were a grand cabal that conquered and plundered the Third World.  (I do not have a link to the source; I recall this from Thomas Sowell’s discussion in one of his books — which I think was Cosmic Justice.)  Prosecuting this false claim has been the principal business of the United Nations since its founding.

    This seems quite obvious to me.  Am I missing something?  

     

    Second, I am unaware of any claims, across centuries and nations, that the Jews were part of such grand cabals.  I think that this was launched with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Per Wikipedia (here): “The publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 is usually considered to mark the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature.”

    So your claim that such a story extends across centuries appears to be incorrect.

    The Protocols was a vile lie.  But why would the idea arise that there was a conspiracy of wealthy Jews who were dominating world politics?  Well, maybe because the Rothschilds were a family of extraordinarily wealthy Jews who exercised exceptional power over European politics.  According to Wikipedia (here, citing Niall Ferguson’s book on the Rothschilds, among other sources): “During the 19th century, the Rothschild family possessed the largest private fortune in the world, as well as in modern world history.”  So, it was actually true that a group of Jewish bankers were exercising significant influence over European governments.

    I actually think that this was generally for the good, though there was some corruption involved, and the Rothschilds were important sources for war finance (for the good and the bad).  I think that Ferguson’s book reports that they fin

    It is unsurprising, however, that socialists (nationalist and internationalist alike), who wrongly blamed capitalism for the ills of the world, would tend to focus their attention on the very pinnacle of the capitalist system — which happened to be occupied by the Rothschilds — who happened to be Jews.

    Thus, the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and the modern Left is a recent phenomenon, and has a rational basis if you accept their (erroneous) critique of capitalism generally.

    • #53
  24. Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… Member
    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio…
    @ArizonaPatriot

    Some of the responses to my arguments above are quite disappointing.

    I provides support for my assertion that there are false claims of anti-Semitism, from the leading Jewish organization that proclaims itself as a watchdog for anti-Semitism.  Indeed, I demonstrated that the ADL is a deeply anti-American organization, rejecting our core values of freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion.

    The response seems to be that the ADL is not representative.  To me, that’s like ignoring what the NAACP says on issues of race.  No counter-argument is presented.  No contrary authority is cited.  There is simple denial, which ignores the facts.

    On the next issue, I dissent from the view that the historical suffering of the Jews has been unusual.  I presented significant evidence, principally the history of England.  I pointed out the brutal treatment by the Israelites of their neighbors, including near-genocide, in Old Testament times.  No counter-argument is presented.  No contrary authority is cited. 

    There is an assertion about the length of time that the Jews were persecuted.  This actually tends to prove my point.  The Jews were one of the only groups to survive from ancient times.  Where are the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Midianites, the Philistines, or the many other groups in the Bible?  Where are the Carthaginians, or the Bithynians, or the Scythians, or the Celts, or the Etruscans?  What about the Gypsies?

    • #54
  25. Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… Member
    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio…
    @ArizonaPatriot

    Ed G. (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):
    To only have the ADL to blame for “exaggerating” Jewish issues is not credible to me.

    I don’t think he is blaming only the ADL. I think he’s saying that the ADL isn’t immune from the woke times and they have begun to be woke too.

    Actually, this is not what I am saying.  I’m saying that the ADL has been playing the Woke game for a very long time, before anyone had identified Wokeism.  The anti-Semitism charge may be the archetype of all of the vilifying, defamatory, debate-stifling hate terms of Wokeism — racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, transphobe, xenophobe.

    I’m not completely sure that deployment of the anti-Semitism charge was first.  Racist seems to have a pretty long pedigree, too.

    The situation is difficult, because genuine anti-Semitism and genuine racism do exist.  Something shifted, probably around the late 1960s or early 1970s, and these terms became weaponized as a means to silence opposition.  Douglas Murray covers this in his fine new book, The Madness of Crowds, though he erroneously thinks that it is a new thing.  It was quite well documented in Judge Bork’s book Slouching Towards Gomorrah back in 1996, and the Judge traced the origins at least to the 1960s.

    • #55
  26. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    aardo vozz (View Comment):

    Stina (View Comment):

    aardo vozz (View Comment):
    I’m not claiming uniqueness of Jews being objects of hate or persecution, just length of time.

    They are unique in having maintained their national identity through centuries.

    All the rest of us aren’t allowed to have national identities. And if we think we do, we are thoroughly disabused of the notion of nations even existing.

    No argument there, and one of th reasons I think we Jews have been hated for so long.

    Only in that those who are loudest in other nations not forming an identity have a strong likelihood to be jewish.

    I get that they are aiming for self-preservation, but telling others they can’t have what they themselves actively seek is really a great way to build animosity.

    • #56
  27. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Stina (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):
    Who says that any criticism of the items you list should be called anti-Semitic? That’s ridiculous.

    Claire Berlinski tried to associate criticism of Soros funding as anti-semitic.

    Trying to seriously understand how the environment in Germany led to WWII is frequently considered anti-semitic.

    Criticizing the passage of anti-free speech laws in Florida that penalize criticism of Israel is anti-semitic.

    There’s a lot of honest questions that can’t be discussed because of anti-semitism.

    First of all, who stopped people from criticizing Claire?

    I think the point is that labelling a position or act Antisemitic stifles its articulation because nobody (very very few people) are okay with being seen as Antisemites, or as not acting against Antisemites.

    To an extent it does work (hence the laws limiting free speech on criticism of Israel in some of the States), but it also degrades the meaning of the term (Antisemitism), which imho is unfortunate.

    People stop taking it as seriously as they should because it isn’t used as seriously as it should be.

    Not only that, Soros has a reputation, long-established, as an anti-Semite.

    I’ve never understood the logic of this.

    It’s like some Muslims calling Ayaan Hirsi Ali Islamophobic.

    It only barely makes sense if I cede to those Muslims the right to define what being Muslim means, and why would I do that?

     

    • #57
  28. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… (View Comment):

    The Jews were one of the only groups to survive from ancient times. Where are the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Midianites, the Philistines, or the many other groups in the Bible? Where are the Carthaginians, or the Bithynians, or the Scythians, or the Celts, or the Etruscans? What about the Gypsies?

    The Assyrians (some of whom are Chaldeans, as in members of the Chaldean Church) and the Gypsies are still around. Though were the Gypsies mentioned in the Bible?

    • #58
  29. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Zafar (View Comment):
    I think the point is that labelling a position or act Antisemitic stifles its articulation because nobody (very very few people) are okay with being seen as Antisemites, or as not acting against Antisemites.

    I couldn’t even talk to my own husband about my questions or doubts on feeling lied to because I was afraid my questions would brand me an anti-semite.

    If I’m not willing to trust my husband with the questions, I won’t be sharing them here :p

    • #59
  30. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Stina (View Comment):

    Only in that those who are loudest in other nations not forming an identity have a strong likelihood to be jewish.

    I get that they are aiming for self-preservation, but telling others they can’t have what they themselves actively seek is really a great way to build animosity.

    I think all minorities are wary when the way their countries define nationality or meaningful belonging exclude them.

    Most obviously ethno-religious minorities, but there are probably others as well.

    And there are ways of defining nationhood that can include as well.

    For eg Australian Nationhood is not defined by ethnicity or religion. It’s intrinsically potentially inclusive.  

    But it certainly used to be defined that way, and that’s an important part of our history we need to take into account.

    • #60
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