Antisemitism Now
Possibly the worst essay on antisemitism I’ve ever seen is in The Atlantic by Dara Horn. Paywalled, which is just as well. It’s hysterical rubbish.
I don't doubt the anecdotes about antisemitic bias. There are quite a few of them. Nor do I doubt that there is a problem of rising antisemitism in the U.S. and elsewhere. Still, where should we locate it in the context of upwards of 30,000 -- and counting -- dead Palestinians?
"The sordid history of the concept of anti-Zionism" cited by Horn betrays galloping ignorance, if not bias. She describes Jews as "indigenous" to Israel? Really?? Most Jewish history is anti-Zionist, or at least, non-Zionist, especially in the U.S. It goes well beyond Bolshevism. The emphasis on the latter in the essay is cartoonish.
For years, intermittently, I've been reading the Nirenberg book Horn discusses. It’s not beach reading. It's compelling. A central point is that, throughout the millenia of history, potted ideas about Judaism figured hugely in social and political contexts where actual Jews were not present or were inconsequential. I have argued that the modern analogy here in the U.S. is immigrants. These days immigrants (and POC in general), if not the Woke, are held to be at the root of everyone's problems, hardly the Jews. So I'd say the essayist inverts the implications of Nirenberg's study.
Until recently, thanks to Israel, antisemitism in the U.S. was mostly buried. Israel proclaims itself to be the vessel of world Jewry, so what Israel does, The Jews are doing. The underlying ignorance and hatred dovetail with the roots that Nirenberg elaborates, but neither are they divorced from current events.
The essay paints Palestinian support politics as monochromatically eliminationist. That is simply racist. Even Hamas does political horse-trading. They've been doing it with Israel for years. The treatment of anti-Zionist rhetoric and agitation is similarly hysterical.
For more on "the sordid history of anti-Zionism" (sic), I'd suggest this new piece in The New Yorker.
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When I think "antisemitism," I think of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Which pretty much articulates the Fox News view of the world, replacing the word "Jew" with "liberal," which rhymes with "rootless cosmopolitan." So yes, I'm scared witless of American antisemitism.
I'm not afraid of the over-the-top idiocy of a few college kids.
Katie Halper interviewed Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro on why Zionism is anti-Semitic. The Rabbi explained that originally, Jewishness was composed of three elements: 1.God 2.gave the Torah 3. to the Jews The Jews were those people who were enjoined by God to fulfill the Torah. That's it. There was no notion of nationhood at all.
The Zionists, however, insist that every Jew has a homeland in Israel; that Israel is the nation of the Jews -- all of them. In fact, now, at this point, there is no such thing as Israeli nationality. France is the country of people of French nationality; Bolivia is the country of people of Bolivian nationality. But in Israel, there may be Israeli citizenship, but the nationality is Jewish. The Supreme Court of Israel has ruled that an Israeli nationality does not exist: Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people.
So of course, if you oppose Israel, you are an enemy to the Jewish people: an anti-Semite.
Rabbi Shapiro regards this attitude as itself anti-Semitic.